The Wheel
by pollywantsa
Summary: As Harlock builds his fledgling crew and works towards his plan to reset the universe, he can't escape the ghosts that haunt him… in more ways than one. 2013 movie-verse.
1. part 1

**The Wheel**

* * *

 **part one**

* * *

It was what he always wanted.

This.

And her.

Just as she was. Just as she would always be. Frozen in the here and the now with the light forever glinting in her hair.

Harlock stood at the bathroom door, watching the stiff movements of her back as she busied herself over the sink. The display was for him, the manifestation of her irritation that he was here. Again. That he didn't have strength enough to stay away.

'I told you not to come,' she said to the cracked porcelain of the bowl. She looked up and out of the tiny window, at the weeds that clung to the brickwork beyond the grimed glass. 'If anybody sees you here, we'll both be dead.'

'Marry me,' he said, making her laugh in the harsh, exasperated way she always did when he asked the question. The same bitter response to the same pointless request.

'I'm Commander of the Fleet.' His boots scuffed against the cracks in the flooring as he moved to stand behind her. Pressed his groin against her. Sandwiched her between his hardness and the chipped edge of the basin. 'You wouldn't have to live this way with the commander's money to spend.'

'What money?' She leaned back against him. Filled his senses with the warm dry scent of her hair. Blonde. As bright as sunshine. 'I thought you and Tochiro spent it all on boozing and whoring.'

'Only on booze.' He wrapped his arms around her. Cupped his firm officers' hands beneath the petite mounds of her breasts. Whispered into her ear, 'our whores we get for free.'

'Bastard,' she said, nipples hardening beneath the cotton of her shirt.

'My whores call me Captain,' he smirked.

'Captain Bastard,' she corrected, sighing as his lips ran hot along the nape of her neck.

'Marry me,' he said again. 'When the war is over – '

'Hah,' she laughed. Bitter again. Her body turning cold beneath his fingers. 'The war.' She pulled away from him, made him drop his hands from her breasts as she twisted out from his grip and turned to face him. 'This dirty, stinking war.'

'Maya,' he said, staring into the darkness of her eyes and knowing what was coming next. 'Don't – '

'What are you doing, Harlock? Fighting a war for the stinking Sanction?'

'Don't,' he said again, because he'd heard it too many times. It had haunted his dreams for decades.

'What are you even doing here,' she continued. 'The great commander of the Dark Matter Fleet – aiding and abetting a fugitive. _Fucking,'_ she spat, _'a fugitive.'_

That part stung. It always stung.

'After the war,' he said, repeating his lines as he had a thousand times before, 'you won't be a fugitive. You won't need to fight anymore, because the Earth will be free.'

'Why don't you understand?' Her eyes searched his and found nothing there that she liked. 'As long as the Sanction exists there can _be_ no freedom.'

'There _will_ be freedom. That's what I'm fighting for. I'm fighting for a free Earth.' His hand searched blindly for hers and came up empty. 'I'm fighting for you, Maya. I'm always fighting for you.'

'Then stop fighting for me. Stop coming back for me. If the Sanction found out they'd put you in front of a firing squad.'

'I don't care. I love you. Marry me.'

'No.' She smiled, softening despite herself. 'The answer will always be no. Because one day that careful construct of yours will break, and I don't want to be there when it does.'

He lifted a hand to smooth her hair and arranged it carefully across her shoulders. 'Or maybe you do.'

She sighed, moved herself a little closer. Pressed a hand against the stiff leather of his jacket. 'How does that rebel manage to get himself into that uniform every day?'

'It's hard work,' he conceded. 'But I'm improving.'

'I can't stand looking at it.'

Her fingers worked at the tunic, popping the buttons one by one from their housings until the uniform slipped free of his shoulders and fell carelessly to the cracked and fading floor. He stood exposed in the filtered light from the window, skin tightening at the sudden exposure to air. Or maybe it was tightening at the look she was giving the neatly defined musculature of his torso. A grin flew impulsively across his face as he leaned forward and grasped the tails of her shirt and slid it roughly over her head, tousling her hair and making her eyes wild with irritation. The way he always liked it.

'I mean it,' she said as his hands closed in on her breasts and his mouth hovered millimetres above her own. 'Don't come back.' His thumb grazed across a nipple, made her suck in a sudden breath. 'It's too dangerous. And public executions – '

He pressed his lips against her own, drowned out her words as he melted his body into hers and curled his arms around her. Skin against skin and mouth against mouth. Lost in the feel of her, the smell of her, the –

' _Harlock.'_

He deepened the kiss, ignoring the voice that whispered in his ear.

' _Harlock.'_

Maya didn't hear the voice. Maya never heard the voice. She only sighed as she pressed herself against him and ran her hands across his shoulders, curled her fingers desperately into his hair.

' _Here you are.'_

'Miimé,' he said, breaking the kiss. 'Get out of my head.'

A cool body pressed against his back and he felt Miimé's breath, soft against the nape of his neck. Her hand snaked between his body and Maya's and settled on the hard, flat plane of his stomach.

' _She doesn't love you,'_ Miimé said. _'She never loved you.'_

'She loves me,' he murmured, sliding his hands down Maya's back, across her hips, and cupping them warm around her buttocks. 'She loves me with her body. And with her lips. And her eyes...'

' _But not with her words.'_

'Who cares about words?'

Miimé laughed, a light high tinkle as elusive as quicksilver. _'You know how this will end.'_

'It never has to end.'

' _It will always end.'_

'You're a cold hard bitch,' he told her, his fingers latching onto the clasp of Maya's skirt and sliding it smoothly from her hips to the floor. Maya was always so feminine, even when she was on the run from the law. 'You know what comes next, Miimé, so get out of my head.'

The laugh came again, exasperating him. _'I've seen it before.'_ Miimé snaked another hand across his stomach, helpfully undid the button of his trousers and let them fall around his ankles. _'This is usually how it goes. Too impatient to do it properly.'_

That made him smile, because he always was too impatient. Far too impulsive to think things through. 'What would you know about doing it properly?'

Miimé smiled, and he felt it in the shifting of her fingers, her hands rising up across his stomach to settle cool against his chest. _'I'm learning.'_

'Learn, then,' he said. He didn't care anymore. She'd watched him more times than he cared to count, and if she wanted to watch him again, rutting like an animal in the dark spaces of his memories, he was helpless to stop her.

* * *

 _((wake up))_

The voice played at the edges of his hearing, nudged him none-too-gently from his dream into waking.

 _((harlock))_

Harlock opened his good eye, lay in his bed and stared at the chandelier in the ceiling. Miimé stirred alongside him, one hand splayed across his stomach and the tip of a thumb settled squarely in his navel. He felt her mouth move against his shoulder, her teeth grazing sharp across his skin.

'Tochiro,' he said. 'What is it?'

 _((there's a vessel registering on the long-range scanners))_

'Has it made contact?'

 _((no))_

'Has it seen us?'

 _((no indication))_

Harlock sighed and lifted his hand to rub the sleep from his face. 'Then let the first mate deal with it. That's what first mates are for.'

 _((you're right. I'm not used to it yet))_

'Old friend,' Harlock said, placing his hand on Miimé's where it rested on his stomach. 'It's time you stopped doing all the thinking. Soon we'll have a full complement and you can rest.'

 _((hah))_

Harlock smiled and squeezed his fingers hard around Miimé's. He rolled abruptly onto her, pinned her hands above her head as he gently nudged her legs apart.

'Miimé,' he said, his body hot against her cool nakedness. 'Stay the fuck out of my dreams.' Her lips curled into a smile as he leaned in to kiss them, the movement chaste and gentle and pure, because she was a delicate thing and he never wanted to infect her with the hard burn of his anger. 'Now show me what you've learned.'

* * *

Yattaran blinked at the readout on his console, scratched at his head and blinked again. 'Oi. Ari. Get over here and tell me what you see.'

Aristotle Jones shot a look at the only other occupant of Arcadia's bridge, rubbed contemplatively at the stubble on his chin and stared back down at the console he was parked against. 'Gimme a break. I don't even know what I'm looking at _here.'_

'Just move your annoying arse.'

'Aye aye _sir.'_ Aristotle hiked up his pants and came to stand beside the first mate. 'What am I looking at?'

'That.' Yattaran took a step back to allow Arcadia's newest recruit room to move.

'All I see is stars,' Ari groused. 'What else should I see?'

'There.' Yattaran poked a fleshy finger at the screen 'That bright spot there.'

'This is a false-colour image, right?'

'Right.'

'Then I haven't got a fuckin' clue. What is it?'

'It's a dark matter bloom.'

Aristotle straightened from the screen and turned to look at the first mate. 'If you knew what it was, then why the hell are you asking me?'

Yattaran showed his teeth. 'Because I'm the first mate and I'm enjoying ordering you around.'

'Great. What did you do for fun before I came aboard?'

'I took a lot of baths.'

'And yet it never helped with the smell.'

'Hah.' Yattaran poked Aristotle's arm with a fist. 'Funny bastard, aint ya.'

'I try.' Aristotle poked a fist right back.

'Hey!' Yattaran yelped and rubbed at his arm, aggrieved at the unexpected insult to his flesh. 'You're stronger than you look.'

Aristotle grinned. He raised a hand in the air and clenched and unclenched the fingers of his fist. 'Comes from crushing rocks between my fingers. Look,' he said, rolling up a sleeve to reveal a nasty scar that wound its way from his wrist to his forearm. 'Got that digging for neodymium with my bare hands.'

'Bullshit,' Yattaran gruffed.

'Yeah,' Aristotle laughed. 'I've dug for that too, but it don't leave scars.'

'What about that,' Yattaran said, indicating the slash of white on Aristotle's forehead. 'I s'pose you smash rocks with your thick skull, too.'

Aristotle's hand snaked up to his face, fingers skimming the scar that curved over his right eye. His hand dropped suddenly away, as if he didn't like to touch it. 'Yeah,' he said. 'A story for another day.'

Yattaran looked at him, musing. 'Secrets, hey. Well, I've got a something on my left testicle that I don't like to talk about, either.'

'Jesus, man. Too much information!'

There was a squawk behind them. A rustling of feathers that made them jump and turn to look at the captain's chair. Harlock's bird perched there, head cocked, the black beady eyes studying them intently. As birds go it was enormous – over three feet of constant hunger in an ungainly black package.

'Shit,' said Aristotle. 'When did that arrive?'

Yattaran shrugged. 'I dunno. It was already here when I first came aboard.'

Aristotle turned an incredulous glare on the first mate. 'No, you imbecile. How long has it been sitting there watching us?'

'I don't know.' Yattaran shrugged again. 'It's black. It blends in. Why? You worried it's been listening?'

'Yes.'

Yattaran barked out a laugh. 'You're an idiot.'

'I'm serious,' Aristotle protested. 'It understands everything you say.'

'Bullshit.'

'Watch.' Aristotle turned to the bird. 'Hey, Mr Bird, there's a cracker in my pocket.'

Yattaran snorted. 'You keep crackers in your pocket?'

'Yeah. Ever since I got lost on deck 17. And don't think I didn't notice that you and Maji didn't come looking for me. Now shuddup and watch.'

The bird's head had risen on its flimsy neck at the mention of crackers, and a series of hopeful squawks bubbled unmelodiously out of its beak. Without warning it exploded from its perch in a flutter of wings and feathers and crash-landed on the deck at Aristotle's feet, one wing flapping tenaciously at his leg while the long beak probed at one of his pockets.

'Not that pocket,' Aristotle instructed it patiently. The bird squawked again and snapped at the other pocket until Aristotle relinquished a cracker out of his stash. 'Good bird,' he said, smoothing the rough feathers of its head. He raised a smug eyebrow at Yattaran. 'See?'

'So what,' Yattaran said. 'The captain's bird likes you.' He winked and then leered, 'So does the captain's woman, hey?'

Aristotle hissed, shooting the first mate a look and shaking his head in violent negation. 'There's nothing going on there – she's just fucking with my mind.' And then he added crabbily, 'and keep your voice down, would ya?'

'Why?' Yattaran folded his arms and eyed him speculatively. 'Guilty conscience?'

Aristotle let go of the bird's head and peeled a black downy feather from his fingers. 'It's just…' He glanced around the deserted bridge, at the shadows that worked relentlessly at sucking up the light. 'Don't you ever feel like you're being watched? Like there's somebody, or something, inside your head? Sometimes I only have to look at a monitor and think about what I want to do with it, and the screen changes. Shows me exactly what I want to see without me even touching it. Creeps the shit out of me.'

Yattaran gazed at him and pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. 'Coincidence,' he suggested lamely.

'My arse. I know you know what I mean. How do you think Harlock's been running the ship on his own all these years? Even with you and me and Maji it's more than we can manage.'

Yattaran's finger moved to scratch at his ear. 'He's got the Nibelung.'

'Yeah. And the bird. But this is a goddamned battleship. It would take more than one human, and one alien, and Mr Bird here to run it.'

The bird squawked at Aristotle's knee, rubbed against his leg and nipped gently at his fingers until a second cracker made an appearance out of his pocket. Aristotle ruffled the bird's feathers. 'Yeah. You know your name, don't you, Mr Bird? Maybe _you_ were Arcadia _'s_ first mate before Tubby here came along?'

* * *

Harlock leaned a hand against the wall of the shower and let a stream of heat play against the back of his neck. Water flowed across his down-turned face, separated into rivulets that ran warm across his lips. He opened his mouth and let the water sluice across his teeth.

 _((harlock))_

 _Here,_ Harlock said, not using words. Letting the thoughts move directly through Tochiro's interface.

 _((first mate's detected a dark matter bloom))_

Harlock's eye opened beneath the cascading stream. _Distance?_

 _((89 AU))_

 _Same location as the ship you reported earlier?_

 _((yes. suggest the dark matter bloom is an inskip residue))_

Harlock straightened beneath the cascade of water and brought up a hand to brush strands of wet hair from his face. _Could be nothing. Could be a random pulse left from the Creation._

 _((or it could be your worst nightmare))_

 _All my nightmares are the worst. What's Yattaran doing?_

 _((arguing. with the rookie))_

Harlock smirked as he shut the water off. _Aristotle will argue with anybody._

 _((he's fun to watch))_

 _Miim_ _é_ _thinks so._

 _((don't be jealous. it's the blond hair. and he still has his new toy smell))_

 _I'm not jealous,_ Harlock said. Miimé had always been fascinated by blonds. She said they smelled different. And Aristotle had the added bonus of blue eyes as well. That made Harlock grin – the poor bastard didn't have a hope in hell. _Miim_ _é's free to torment anybody she wants._

 _((ah, yes, what was it you said? no commitments))_

 _No attachments,_ Harlock corrected.

 _((when did you grow so cold))_

 _You know when._

* * *

'Yattaran,' Harlock said, making the first mate jump. 'The ship's computer reports a dark matter signature on the long range scanners. Report.'

Yattaran's head spun 180 on his neck to look at Harlock standing behind him, then cranked back to glance at Aristotle, pinned between the bird and the adjacent console. 'Aye sir. We picked it up earlier. The instruments briefly registered a ship the same distance out, but the signal's not there now.'

Harlock moved to stand beside him, hair damp and his skin still smelling faintly of soap. He was wearing a pair of pale pants, the leather sullied by time to a dirty grey that collided abruptly with the black of his tunic.

'The computer suggests it's an inskip residue,' Harlock said. He slid in between Yattaran and the console, his fingers passing deftly across the sensor controls. He turned to look the first mate. 'What do you think?'

'Ah… that would be impossible.' Yattaran looked at Harlock's face, his gaze studiously avoiding the tiny teeth marks that were bruised along the captain's lower lip. 'Wouldn't it?'

'Nothing's impossible.' Harlock glanced across at the XO's console, smiling indulgently at the bird's attempts to get its beak back into Aristotle's pocket. 'There's a reason we keep the food stores behind locked doors, Aristotle.'

'Understood, Captain.' Aristotle grinned sheepishly at his station and dodged the flapping of a wing as the bird's talons trampled haphazardly over his boots.

'Well,' Yattaran said, leaning back at his post and rubbing a knuckle vigorously into his lower back, 'it would only make sense if the other ship had a dark matter drive. And Arcadia _'s_ the only ship with a dark matter drive that I know of.'

'That you know of,' Harlock repeated, making Yattaran's eyes blink behind the lenses of his glasses. 'There are others. And we have no idea how many Nibelung ships might have escaped destruction.'

'But the legends say the Nibelung ships were all destroyed.'

'Not all of them,' Harlock said.

'So what,' Aristotle interrupted, his hand on the bird's head as he attempted to guide it away from any further exploration of his pants. 'So there are other ships with dark matter drives out there, and nobody sounds too happy about it. But unless there's a club that we're supposed to join, why don't we steer clear?'

Harlock relinquished Yattaran's console. 'For the moment I agree. But running from trouble doesn't necessarily mean trouble won't come running for us. Where's Maji?'

'On the hangar deck,' Yattaran said, 'sorting out a problem in the deployment module.'

Harlock nodded. 'Leave that. Put him on the XO and automate a scanner sweep every ten minutes. Alert me if you detect anything that looks even remotely out of place. Aristotle, meet me on the lower command and I'll instruct you on the operations of the weapons console.' A smile crooked the corner of his mouth. 'Something tells me that the cannon are going to be your thing.'

* * *

 _((miimé. what do you see))_

'Nothing.' Miimé stood alone at the massive windows that lined the rear of Harlock's rooms, staring through the leaded glass into the silent wastes of space. The dark matter engine was dormant, the boiling cloud of inskip long since dissipated into space. Arcadia coasted along on impulse power, the stars around them distant and unwavering in the void. 'Whatever was there is gone now.'

 _((so… not a bloom from the creation))_

'Doubtful,' she replied to Tochiro, 'since it has dissipated. And I know from the Nibelung records that the original sources were always constant. Eternal connections between the present and the past.'

 _((and the future))_

'It's a logical supposition, but one that was never definitively proven.'

 _((there's evidence to suggest that the Nibelung proved it))_

'Or were destroyed in the doing.' She sighed, the movement releasing a drift of fireflies from her hair, the manifestation of the dark matter that coursed through her blood. 'I miss my sisters.'

 _((i miss everything. noodles. mushrooms. the feel of a warm body in your bed... heeey, miimé, there's a few warm bodies for you to choose from now, hey))_

She smiled. 'Some warmer than others.'

Tochiro laughed. _((i wish i still had a warm body))_

'Human bodies seem to be more trouble than they are worth. And so easily damaged.'

 _((ah, but miimé, never forget that positives always outweigh negatives. there's the feel of the sun on your skin. and the wind through your hair. a belly full of food…))_

The double doors of the captain's quarters creaked open on their hinges, permitting the entry of the bird in a squawking flap of feathers. Harlock followed on its heels, closing the doors carefully again behind him. 'Dreaming of food again, old friend?'

 _((always))_

Harlock crossed to his desk and collapsed wearily into the ornate chair that was parked behind it. 'You and the bird have the same one-track minds,' he said as the bird waddled up beside him and rested its long beak across his lap. He sighed, ruffling the bird's feathers as he glanced towards Miimé at the window.

'How goes the training?' she asked him, feeling his gaze on her back.

Harlock grimaced and turned to look longingly at the wine that waited patiently on his desk. In a minute he would pour himself a glass. Just as soon as he could muster the energy. 'I forgot how tiring people could be.'

 _((being sociable is hard work, hey, harlock))_

Harlock allowed a smile to chase wryly across his face. 'I think it might actually be killing me.'

 _((hah. the immortal captain harlock, brought down by polite conversation))_

'Shut up.' Harlock grinned down at the bird, smoothing the ruffled feathers as the black beady eyes stared hopefully up at him. The damn thing was hungry again. Soon it would start snaffling around the room, looking for anything that would fit down its scrawny throat. 'Miimé,' he said, 'do you sense anything out there?'

'Nothing.' She left the window and paced leisurely towards him, poured a glass of wine and pressed it into his fingers.

'Thank you,' he murmured as she moved to stand behind him and rested her hands upon his shoulders.

'It's not the first time we've seen this shadow,' she said.

'But it's the first time we've caught glimpse of a ship,' Harlock replied as her hands moved up to his face.

'Maybe we shouldn't loiter in this space.'

'You're right,' Harlock said, succumbing to Miimé's ministrations as her thumbs described small circles at his temples. Pleasure and pain and the eternal bite of dark matter. 'Tochiro, take us out – '

 _((nope. you have a crew now. the captain will need to get up off his arse and give the order))_

'Mm,' Harlock replied, lost to the pressure of Miimé's fingers. 'Seems you're not the only one who keeps forgetting.'

 _((you're only human. must be difficult relying on that hard lump of grey in your head))_

Harlock ignored him, his left eye closing as Miimé's fingers moved into his hair, his right eye sealed irrevocably shut beneath the leather patch that covered it.

 _((oi. harlock. did you hear me? i said it must be difficult – ))_

'I heard you,' Harlock cut in. 'I was just remembering how hard your head used to be.'

Tochiro laughed, a high bright babble of static. _((those were the days, eh, harlock))_

'We'll have those days again, old friend,' Harlock said softly. He leaned his head back, resting it against the back of the chair as Miimé's fingers worked their way across his scalp.

 _((it's good to have people around again))_

'Voices to listen to,' Miimé said, making Harlock tilt his head back to look up at her in surprise.

 _((speaking of, the loudest voice is making noise again. says he's hungry))_

'I'll go,' Miimé said, sliding her hands out of Harlock's hair.

'Miimé,' Harlock said, grabbing hold of her wrist before she could slip away. 'Play nice with Aristotle. And Tochiro… keep out of his head.'

 _((is that an order))_

Harlock sighed, regretting that he'd even brought it up. Tochiro was as wilful in the spirit as he had been in the flesh. 'It's a request. Consider it a favour amongst gentlemen.'

 _((no gentlemen here, old friend. you have no idea how entertaining it is in there. you should try it sometime – there's alien sex and everything))_

* * *

'You have no idea,' Yattaran was saying to Maji at the executive command and sounding like a housewife as he was doing so. 'He argues every damn point and questions every damn order. He's driving me crazy.'

Maji shrugged, staring at the display on his console. 'None of us are exactly experts at this. Taking orders, giving orders… and Arcadia isn't the most regimented of ships. Let it go. Captain will pull rank if he has to.'

'Yeah, but I'm first mate. Ari should do what I tell him. And without any bitching!'

Maji shook his head. 'Give it up. Captain likes him. And I suppose he's entertaining…in his own way.'

'He's entertaining alright. You should have seen him earlier with the damn bird.' Yattaran grinned and scratched at his three-day-growth. 'You know he carries crackers in his pocket?'

'Because of deck 17?'

'Because of deck 17.' They both burst out laughing.

As if on cue, Aristotle's voice drifted up from the lower command. 'Shit I'm boooored.'

Yattaran shared a grin with Maji. 'Ignore it,' he stage-whispered to the engineer, 'and it might go away.'

'And huuuuungry,' came the plaintive cry from below.

Maji returned the whisper theatrically. 'It's not going away.'

'And once it starts it never damn-well stops,' Yattaran groused. He took a deep breath and bellowed out across the cavernous wastes of the bridge. 'What about those bottomless pockets of crackers?'

'Damn bird cleaned me out,' the disembodied voice moaned.

Maji moved out from the XO's post and peered over the gantry at the sole occupant of the lower command, who despite all the complaining was bent intently over the scanner sweep of the weapons console. 'Hey, Rookie,' he said to the back of Aristotle's head, 'nobody cares if you're hungry. Captain's orders were to stand watch.'

'Yeah,' Aristotle turned to look up at him, 'but he didn't say we had to starve while we were doing it.'

'Consider it part of the training, Rookie.'

Aristotle's hands planted themselves obstinately on his hips. 'How long are you two gonna keep calling me that?'

Maji grinned down at him. 'Until we get a new rookie, Rookie.'

Laughter floated down from the upper command – Yattaran, laughing the phlegmy laugh of the overly-indulgent.

'Great,' Aristotle muttered, rolling his eyes. 'I get to die of starvation while that lump of lard sits pretty on his accumulated stores of – uh-oh.' He backed up against the weapons command, hands dropping abruptly from his hips. _'Shit,'_ he cursed beneath his breath as Miimé paced the deck towards him, a bloom of light appearing silently out of the dark. He still hadn't got used to her – the faintly glowing skin, the upswept points of her ears, the unblinking orbs of her cat-like eyes. But she had all the right curves in all the right places, and that, at least, he was more than able to appreciate.

'Miimé,' he said, his back to the stars and perspiration pricking beneath his skivvie as she relentlessly paced towards him. 'Um…can I help you?'

'Ship's computer says you're hungry,' she replied, placing a flask in one of his hands and a vacuum-sealed package in the other.

'The ship's computer?' he croaked, raising the package and flask to stare at them incredulously. 'How the hell does the ship's comp – _uh.'_ He pressed back against the console as she moved in between his outspread arms and stared into his eyes, the vacuum-pack slipping from his fingers with a dry crunch that could only signal the shattering of crackers.

'Miimé,' he pleaded softly, squirming where she pinned him with his back against the console, her breath cool in his face and only millimetres of electric air between their bodies. She smiled and cocked her head as though he were an exotic, talking flower, and she was enjoying marvelling at the magnificence of his blooming. Yattaran's voice drifted down from the upper command, sniggering faintly, and Aristotle glanced up to see Maji, still poised at the edge of the gantry, watching them with an unreadable expression on his face.

'Lady, you're killing me,' Aristotle groaned as Miimé trailed a finger down his cheek and ran it musingly across the stubble that spattered blond across his chin. A firefly drifted from her hair and sparked against his lower lip, his tongue darting out to assuage the sting. Her mouth quirked wickedly as he swallowed, her eyes on his adam's apple as it bobbed beneath the rollneck of his skivvie.

'Are you afraid?' she asked, her face close against his and another spark leaping from her hair and stabbing him in the cheek.

'No,' he lied, his face stinging and twitching, his free hand clutching the console behind him and preventing him from sliding weak-kneed to the floor. Miimé smiled, a tiny knowing smile, and he might have chanced tasting those cool pale lips if Maji hadn't been standing there watching. And if Miimé hadn't been the captain's woman.

She laughed, a soft sound, as light and pure as a bell, and Aristotle felt it pass like water through his brain. 'Liar,' she said, revealing a row of sharp alien teeth that he had a sudden urge to test with his tongue. 'Don't be afraid,' she added softly. 'I won't bite.' And then her words moved inside his head... _'Harlock told me not to.'_

'Girl,' Aristotle started to say, his mouth moving before his brain caught up with what had just happened inside his head. 'I don't care what – wait. What? Did you – ? How…? What the hell just happened?'

'What do you think just happened,' she asked him, her voice sweetly innocent and her eyes playfully mischievous in the dim light.

'For a moment I thought – ' He shook his head as her hand settled on his shoulder and anchored him back in three-dimensional reality. 'Nothing.' He shook his head again, as if to get the water out of it. 'Must have been my imagination.'

Her fingers slid towards his upper arm. 'Don't you trust your imagination?'

Now it was his turn to grin. 'Only at night.'

She smiled again, sent sea-foam bubbling inside his head. Aristotle blinked at the sensation, stared into the pale orbs of her eyes as her gaze moved suddenly to the stars beyond him. Watched with confusion as the laughter drained abruptly from her face.

'Miime,' he said as her fingers clamped tight around his bicep. 'What is it?'

She stiffened against him, dug her nails into him, made him hiss in pain as a burst of dark matter exploded from her body and burned across his skin like lightning.

'Warn the captain,' she said, the fear in her voice galvanising him into action. 'Something is coming.'


	2. part 2

**The Wheel**

* * *

 **part two**

* * *

'Captain to the bridge,' Aristotle said into the comms, not caring if he undercut the mate's prerogative. 'Okay darlin',' he turned back to Miimé. 'Captain's on his way. Want to tell me what's got you so spooked?'

Miimé whispered a nameless sound, a word from her own lost tongue, and pointed out into the void. Off the bow a storm was forming. A great black cloud boiling out of nothing and shot through with bolts of red lightning.

Aristotle pitched his voice towards the upper bridge. 'Are you two seeing this?'

'We see it,' the mate replied. He glanced across at the XO. _What the fuck,_ he mouthed to Maji's bewildered shrug.

'Back off a couple of thousand,' the engineer suggested. 'Captain will want to see this.'

'Aye,' the mate replied, engaging the reverse engines.

Aristotle leaned over his console and sighted down the scope. 'What is it?' he asked Miimé as he stared into the expanding bubble of darkness, his skin crawling with the kind of electric dread that accompanies the building of a storm.

'A vortex from a dark matter engine,' she replied in words he could understand.

'Oh.' The gunner targeted the forward cannon on the centre of the mass. 'Much more impressive from the outside.'

'It's too close,' Miimé said, with an edge of unease in her voice.

Aristotle looked up from his scope and stared into the expanding cloud. 'I can see that, darlin'. Yattaran!' he shouted. 'Girl says it's too close. How about you put some distance between us and that cloud?'

'Whaddaya think I'm doin'!' Yattaran barked back.

'Do it faster!'

'How about you mind your station!'

'How about you – ' Aristotle's retort was drowned out by the sudden screech of the proximity alarm. 'Shit!' he cursed, jumping as the alarm scraped across his nerves.

'She's coming out of inskip!' Maji bellowed.

Aristotle brought the guns to bear on the centre of the roiling cloud. 'Cannon armed.'

'Wait,' Miimé said, her voice all but drowned out by the steady whoop of the alarm. Her hand covered Aristotle's and stopped him in his tracks. 'Wait...'

He shook her hand away. 'What am I waiting for?'

'That,' she said, her hand finding his again and stilling it on the board.

He followed her gaze, watched as the swirling envelope of cloud parted to reveal a dark, solid mass that was illuminated by random flashes of red. 'What the hell is it?'

'Deathshadow,' Miimé said, so softly that he had to strain to hear.

'Girl says it's a death shadow,' Aristotle relayed to the upper command.

'Deathshadow?' Yattaran looked again at Maji. 'It can't be…'

'But it is,' Harlock said out of nowhere.

Yattaran turned to find the captain striding the gantry to the wheel. 'Captain at the helm!' the mate announced to the sparse crew, relinquishing the command with grateful haste. 'Orders?'

Harlock's fingers settled around the balusters of the wheel. 'Full power to port thrusters.'

'Aye, sir.' Yattaran cut the reversing engines and relayed power to the thruster banks. 'Port thrusters engaged.'

' _Evasive!'_ Maji's shout came as Deathshadow exploded from the cloud in a burst of red lightning, yawed on her side and fell at speed towards Arcadia.

'What the hell!' Aristotle stared at the battleship that erupted from the vortex. 'Is the pilot of that boat drunk? Damn thing is going to hit us!' He tucked Miimé beneath an arm and braced them both against his console as the ship headed for Arcadia's bow. 'Don't you go exploding on me again, girl – it stings like a bitch!'

' _Brace for impact!'_

This time it was Yattaran doing the hollering, and Aristotle cursed as Miimé released a spark of electricity into his armpit. 'Damn, girl,' he said as Deathshadow continued its uncontrolled trajectory towards Arcadia.

'Move, old friend,' Harlock grunted, spinning the wheel hard to starboard as Deathshadow closed in on them.

 _((hold on))_

The wheel tore itself out of Harlock's grip, the stars spinning crazily across the forward bow as Arcadia attempted futilely to heave herself away from the onrushing ship.

' _Brace!'_ Maji bellowed as Deathshadow smashed against Arcadia, the impact knocking the crew off their feet as the ship tilted violently and shuddered under the onslaught. The bridge filled with the sound of metal tearing, a reverberating, unyielding screech that echoed through the superstructure as the crew struggled back to the urgent blinking of their consoles.

'Breaches in sectors one through five,' Maji reported as Deathshadow ground its way across Arcadia's flank. Sparks erupted across the viewport, a cloud of debris spinning wildly out into space as Arcadia and Deathshadow worked on tearing each other apart.

'Multiple system failure,' Yattaran added, both hands on his console to prevent himself from tipping over. 'Atmosphere leak in sector – '

'Back us off,' Harlock cut in. 'Full reverse.'

'Aye sir!'

'Stand by on cannon.'

'Aye Cap'n,' Aristotle acknowledged as Miimé slid out from where he had wedged her beneath his arm. 'Forward cannon armed.' He wiped a hand across the seat of his pants as he sighted down the targeting display, wondering where the sweet spots might be and blinking as the display refreshed and a schematic of Deathshadow appeared with the optimal targets highlighted. 'Convenient,' he muttered to himself as he resisted the urge to cast a superstitious glance back over his shoulder.

'Target idents as Deathshadow 3,' Maji said, glancing questioningly at the captain.

Harlock didn't return the look. Clamped his teeth down hard against the inside of his lip as Arcadia wrenched herself free.

 _((you're taking this well))_ Tochiro said as Deathshadow drifted slowly away from them, her sleek lines marred by the abrupt contact with Arcadia. The rents to Deathshadow's skin sparked and spat, fires igniting and just as quickly snuffing out in the airless void of space.

' _Why did it have to be her?'_ Harlock whispered inside his head.

 _((bad luck, old friend))_

Harlock's lip twitched.

 _((look at her))_ Tochiro said as the dark hulk of Deathshadow drifted ominously still and silent across Arcadia's bow, her wounds knitting themselves together as they watched.

' _As beautiful as the day you made her.'_

 _((a perfect example of my minimalist phase))_

' _Unlike your current tour-de-force…'_

Tochiro laughed and sent a silver ripple across the surface of Harlock's brain. _((you're not laughing))_ he said when Harlock didn't respond. He pushed deeper into Harlock's mind and retreated abruptly from the cool dread that coalesced there.

'Captain.' Yattaran looked up from his board. 'We're being hailed.'

Harlock's fingers clenched and unclenched on the wheel.

'Captain?' Yattaran ventured again.

Harlock turned to face the first mate, like a sleeper awakening from a dream.

'We're being hailed,' Yattaran repeated, shooting an unsubtle glance across at Maji. 'Orders?'

Harlock left the wheel and moved towards the captain's chair. He lowered himself into it, the crimson leather molding perfectly around him. 'On screen,' he said, his fingers tightening around the skull-carved arms of the chair as the overhead screen erupted in a blaze of light.

Harlock didn't know what he expected as he waited for the visual to stabilise, but he realised when he saw her that a large part of him had hoped she was dead.

'Harlock,' the woman said, the white-blue of her eyes a stark contrast to the dark of her hair. 'I had hoped you were dead.'

 _((great minds))_ Tochiro murmured in the back of Harlock's mind.

'Captain Komarov,' Harlock acknowledged, unmoving in his chair.

'Such formality.' Komarov smiled, but it didn't reach the cold wastes of her eyes. 'Is that any way to greet an old friend? After all that we shared?' The smile fell slowly from her face. 'After all that you did?'

There it was. The accusation. He knew what he did. And so, apparently, did Ekaterina Komarov. 'What do you want, Captain?'

'Permission to come aboard.'

'Denied.'

She acknowledged the refusal with a bow of the head, unsurprised by the rejection. 'Then I suggest we meet somewhere neutral.'

'What do you want,' he asked again, his voice a stone dropping into deep water.

The smile. The hard cold eyes in the still lovely face. 'Neo Triton. Twenty-four hours.'

The transmission ended and left the bridge hanging in sudden darkness. In the ticking silence a muffled sneeze echoed up from the lower command.

'First mate.' Harlock rose from his chair. "Prepare for inskip.'

 _((you're not seriously thinking of going))_

Yattaran turned to the captain, his face fighting a herculean battle against curiosity. It was a war his face was losing. 'Destination?'

'You heard,' Harlock replied, ignoring the bugging of Yattaran's eyes.

 _((she's still crazy))_ Tochiro said.

' _And she's still a bitch,'_ Harlock replied.

 _((ah, shit. don't tell me she still turns you on))_

* * *

'That was some hit we took,' Yattaran groused as he trotted down the stairs from the upper bridge. He paused at the bottom landing and looked across at Aristotle at his post, the gunner's arms folded across his chest and his ass leaned back against the console and his legs crossed carelessly at the ankles as he stared thoughtfully back the first mate. Behind his blond head the forward port towered high above him, the view outside the angled windows dark and obscured by the billowing black folds of inskip.

Yattaran blinked at Aristotle with watery eyes and indicated with a jerk of his head that the gunner should follow him, but it took Aristotle a while to uncross his arms and his legs and tail him into the cavity tucked discretely beneath the gantry of the upper bridge.

'What's this,' Aristotle asked, squeezing himself into the cubby behind the rotund mate and peering over Yattaran's broad fleshy shoulder at the bank of orange-lit displays.

Yattaran ignored the question and scrolled through the external display system, bringing up image after image of the rents and tears in Arcadia's skin. Some of them still sparked fitfully, but most of them were knitting together perceptibly, faster now that Arcadia was deep in inskip and surrounded by the rolling mass of dark matter that beat like thunder against the hull.

'Breaches in sectors one through five,' Yattaran announced loudly, even though Aristotle's chin practically rested on his chubby shoulder as he studied Arcadia's rapidly healing wounds with interest. 'Still leaking atmosphere…' Yattaran took a step back, his heel landing on an unguarded toe and eliciting a pointed _shit_ as Aristotle slid his foot out from beneath the mate's heavy boot.

'Ahh… what am I worried about?' Yattaran said, oblivious to the cursing in his ear as he waved a nonchalant hand towards the glowing bank of displays. 'Thanks to the magic of Nibelung technology,' he announced like a circus ringleader, 'Arcadia is invincible!'

Aristotle pressed close to the mate again. 'I'm seeing it,' he stared incredulous at the screen as Arcadia's hull visibly reconstituted itself, the metal knitting itself together seamlessly over the gaping wounds that Deathshadow had torn into it. 'But I'm not believing it.' Maji had one night explained to him about Arcadia's self-repairing capabilities, but until he had seen it with his own eyes Aristotle was never going to believe it. And even now, with the ship repairing itself right in front of him, right before those self-same blue and unblinking eyes, he still wasn't believing it. 'It's not possible…' he breathed as Yattaran's warm bulk shifted and made moves to squeeze back out past him.

'If you're going to ask me how,' Yattaran said laconically, as though he were tired of thinking about the question and couldn't be bothered thinking about it again, 'the short answer is I don't know. And the long answer is I don't know.' He stepped back again, this time avoiding any unwary toes as he eased himself out and lumbered back up the stairs. 'The same process that heals organic material – ' he said, turning to make sure Aristotle was following him ' – and by 'organic material' I mean us – seems to heal Arcadia as well, although with Arcadia it seems to be more accurate. And it's a hell of a lot faster.'

'And I notice it doesn't leave scars,' Aristotle observed, with his own scars still tender beneath the dark material of his skivvie.

Yattaran paused on the landing and waved a hand expansively at the dark matter generator that hummed at the rear of the bridge. 'Quit yer moaning. If it wasn't for that, you wouldn't even be alive.'

'About that,' Aristotle said as he crested the landing behind the mate.

'About what?' Yattaran stretched his arms over his head and leaned back, eyes popping in surprise when his spine produced an audible crack.

'That,' Aristotle said, indicating the dark matter generator. 'Doesn't the girl need to stand watch, or something?'

Yattaran shrugged, scratched, and swallowed down the indigestion he'd been battling since breakfast. Arcadia was deep in inskip, surrounded by billows of dark matter that seethed like storm clouds against the hull. Blood-red sparks of energy cracked like lightning across the forward port, and now and then what sounded like thunder could be heard echoing through the superstructure. Behind the captain's chair the dark matter generator worked unattended, turned silently on its axis, tendrils of light the colour of cool water drifting randomly from the control orb.

'She'll come back when she needs to,' the mate said. He stretched again, and this time nothing popped. 'She's never far away.'

' _I don't like this one,'_ Miimé said, leaning over the two figures coiled tight in the sheets of the bed.

Tochiro sighed the sigh of the unsurprised. _((ekaterina komarov… i could have guessed. he's so predictable))_

Miimé peered down at Harlock as though studying a fine work of art. She leant closer to look, her eyes tracing the smooth contours of his face. _'He was so young.'_

 _((and so stupid))_

'You know I can hear you,'Harlock said, kicking the sheets out from around his ankles.

 _((excuse us. are we distracting you))_

Harlock didn't answer. Leaned in and kissed Ekaterina Komarov instead. In the early days these conversations were forever distracting him, his dreams dissolving into so much smoke and slipping through his fingers. But now… Harlock settled deeper between Ekaterina's thighs, felt her rise sighing up to meet him. He closed his eyes against Tochiro's tut of disgust.

 _((no shame))_

'There must be somebody else you can annoy.'

 _((there is. and i've got the whole night ahead of me))_

'So have I,' Harlock murmured as Ekaterina's legs wrapped themselves around him. 'And I would like for you both to leave so I can enjoy it.' He bent his mouth to Ekaterina's pale throat, trailed his lips leisurely towards her tantalising breasts.

 _((who says we're even here at all))_

Harlock grinned, his tongue momentarily ceasing its circumnavigation of Ekaterina's nipple. 'Are you trying to screw with my mind?'

 _((i don't know. am i))_

Harlock grinned again and glanced up at Miimé, her lips pursed tight in distaste. 'Miimé… if you're not going to leave, you could try joining in.'

Miimé screwed up her nose. ' _I don't like this one,'_ she told him again, her disapproval plain in her voice.

'You don't like any of them,' Harlock replied as Miimé dissolved abruptly from his view, a soft implosion of smoke and green lightning. 'One down,' he whispered as Ekaterina shifted beneath him and wrapped her legs tighter around him. 'One to go.'

Ekaterina didn't answer. Only sighed as Harlock buried his face in the darkness of her hair. Ran his teeth along her throat. Bit down hard on the lobe of her ear.

'Do you taste blood,' she asked as his teeth grazed her skin.

'No,' he murmured, kissing her on the mouth and wincing as her teeth pierced his lip.

'Now?' Ekaterina grinned up at him, feral, her elegant canines glinting in the dim light. Harlock licked at his lips. Tasted salt and iron hot on his tongue.

 _((crazy))_ Tochiro said.

'And about to get a whole lot crazier,' Harlock hissed as Ekaterina's fingernails raked grooves across his skin.

 _((i'll say))_

'What…?' Harlock recoiled as Ekaterina's arms and legs locked tight around him, looked down at her face as her lips pulled back to expose a row of neat, sharp teeth that lengthened perceptibly as he stared.

'What the hell?'

Harlock squirmed in Ekaterina's grip, tried to tear himself free, but the grasping arms and legs hugged him harder, pinned him tight as her fingernails sliced like knives into his back. He felt blood well hot on his skin, struggled in her grip as the lengthening teeth aimed themselves unerringly for his throat and the grasping fingers pierced into him like daggers.

 _((i'd get outta there if I were you))_

'I'm _trying,'_ Harlock gasped, managing to get an arm free and bringing his hand to Ekaterina's face, pushing her head back hard into the bed as the teeth gnashed violently beneath his palm. He gouged a finger into an eye, managed to get his other hand around her throat as her taloned fingers flailed savagely at him, slicing hot into his arms and shoulders and scoring gaping wounds across his chest. He squeezed against her windpipe, the air choking in her throat as her body spasmed erratically. Tendons snapped beneath his fingers and Ekaterina heaved a great, shuddering gasp, her legs loosening from around his waist enough from him to break free. Harlock leapt abruptly from the bed, staggering back as Ekaterina dissolved around him in a black cloud of smoke.

 _((well))_ Tochiro's voice piped into the sudden silence. _((that was interesting))_

Harlock stood, panting, staring down at the empty bed. 'What the hell was that?'

 _((search me. it's your nightmare))_

* * *

Yattaran grabbed hold of Aristotle's arm as he brushed past across the hangar deck, halted him in his tracks and reeled him back in.

'Watch it!' Aristotle slapped Yattaran's hand from his sleeve and fussed with the puckered knit. 'I just found this sweater and I like it. Keep your grubby mitts off.'

'Hnh,' Yattaran grunted. 'Red suits you, Rookie. Brings out the bloodshot in your eyes. Where'd you find it?'

'In the stores. It was this or a dusty old Fleet Lieutenant's jacket. Which might have been useful for snaring the ladies, but would also have been problematic – hey! Who's got bloodshot eyes?'

'Idiot.' Yattaran folded his arms and eyed Aristotle critically. 'You're not going down there to pick up women. Captain's taking you for backup, so I hope you're taking the responsibility seriously.'

'What do you take me for?'

'I just said. An idiot.'

'Listen, funny guy, didn't you hear what the captain said?' Aristotle patted the holster slung low across his hips. 'Guns are my thing.'

'I remember. But I also remember a certain rookie being dragged aboard Arcadia with enough blaster holes in him to drain spaghetti through. I hope you're as good as your word – this ship doesn't fly without her captain.'

Aristotle met the first mate's eyes. 'Yeah,' he said soberly. 'Don't worry. That won't happen again.' He turned as Maji exited the little transport parked mid-centre of the hangar deck.

'She's up to spec,' the engineer announced. 'Neo Triton doesn't have a planetary defence system anywhere near up to par, but this baby should get you through under any radar the DF may be operating.' He looked at Aristotle. 'How's your flying?'

'Nothing fancy,' Aristotle replied. 'I'm rated for heavy transport but I've had enough experience in small craft to get by. I'll be able to manage this.'

'I doubt you'll get a chance. Captain prefers to do his own flying.' Maji pulled a rag from his back pocket and busied himself wiping his fingers. 'Have you eaten today?' he inquired politely, ignoring Yattaran's barked laugh.

'Yes,' Aristotle replied warily. 'Why?' He turned to the grinning first mate. 'Is this about the crackers?'

* * *

Miimé lifted the wine from Harlock's desk, filled her glass close to the brim and settled languidly into the lounge that had been her sanctuary for almost a century. And counting.

'Will you ask about Maer,' she asked, sipping at the wine and watching Harlock as he dressed.

'You said you felt nothing,' Harlock replied from the far side of the room. 'She must be long dead.'

'I need to know,' Miimé said, watching as he buttoned up his trousers and adjusted them on his hips. 'There were only four of us…'

He turned to look at her. 'Miimé…' he said, because he should have realised. Shouldn't have been so caught in his own thoughts that he couldn't read anybody else's. He moved to the couch and knelt at her knee, touched his forehead to her own. _'I'm sorry,'_ he said, letting her feel his remorse through the contact of their skin.

'Don't go,' she said, her breath cool against his face. 'You're in danger.'

'I'm immortal,' he reminded, his lips close to her own.

'You're not immortal.' Her fingers moved across the bare skin of his chest, lingered over the heart that beat strong beneath the palm of her hand. 'You're just harder to kill.'

He laughed, gently, and took her hand from his heart. 'Don't I know it.' He returned to his dressing, shrugged into a shirt and tucked it into his waistband, slid a dark jacket over the top.

'What do you think she wants?' Miimé asked, absorbed by the movement of his body and the human ritual of dressing. After all these years he was still alien to her. Rough and hard with his lingering Earthman smell, despite the dark matter that bled perceptibly through his skin.

'The usual.' Harlock zipped up the jacket and smoothed his hair into place with his hands. 'What everybody wants from me in the end. Revenge... retribution...'

'Or love,' she said, making him turn to look at her.

'Mmh.' It was a kind of a laugh, but the emotion never reached his face. 'What Ekaterina and I had was never love.' He picked up a pair of boots and moved to the bed, sat on its edge and pointedly avoided her gaze. 'It was two people fucking.'

Miimé tilted her head. 'That's a kind of love.'

He bent to his boots, slid them on one by one and attended to the fastenings. 'Sex doesn't always equate to love.'

Miimé sighed in exasperation and released a stream of dark matter into the air. 'Humans are inexplicable. You compartmentalise everything, even love and hate. You didn't love Captain Komarov, and now she hates you.'

'She hates me for more than that.' His hands left the fastening of his boots and he looked questioningly up at her, tracked the flow of fireflies with his one good eye. 'Would they have known, the rest of the fleet, where the chain reaction began?'

Miimé stared back at him with her unblinking eyes. 'Without doubt.'

He nodded, because maybe he'd always known the answer. It was what he'd feared the most.

' _Your secret was never safe,'_ Miimé said, her words moving inside his head at a speed close to light. She drained the last of the wine and placed the glass on the desk, rose from the lounge and paced the short distance to his bed. ' _It was only ever a matter of time.'_

'Time,' he said, reaching for her. 'We've had all the time in the universe to learn from our mistakes, and yet here we are, still screwing up.'

' _Time is an illusion.'_ She leaned into him, slid down to straddle his lap as his hands curved around the small of her back.

'Time is a trap,' he said. His mouth found hers, tasted the wine on her lips with his tongue. 'And soon we'll all be free of it.'

* * *

Yattaran turned as the tread of steady footsteps heralded the arrival of Arcadia's captain on the hangar deck.

'Captain,' he hailed loudly. 'Transport's prepped and primed. Can't say the same for him,' he added, jabbing a thumb sideways at Aristotle.

Harlock followed the direction of Yattaran's thumb, raked his gaze over Aristotle and faltered imperceptibly in his tracks. ' _That damn sweater,'_ he said to Tochiro, staring guardedly at the offending item as though it were an old adversary he hadn't expected to meet again. ' _I thought Miim_ _é_ _disposed of that.'_ There was a moment of internal weightlessness, a crack in his reality as thoughts other than his own slid inside his head.

 _((guess not))_ Tochiro's voice filtered directly into his brain. _((hey, harlock, remember your red phase? it was red everything…jacket… pants… and don't get me started on the cravat…))_

' _This from the man who spent the best years of his life with a sombrero planted on his head.'_

 _((it wasn't a sombrero. and if you didn't like it, you should have said))_

' _I did.'_

 _((i don't remember. and besides, we were talking about the sweater. let the rookie have it. it suits him. a bit tight around the chest…))_

' _So now I have to listen to a running fashion commentary?'_

 _((why not. i've not much else to do))_

' _How about the repairs. How about maintaining Arcadia in orbit. And keeping a lookout for Deathshadow 3.'_

 _((i'm doing all that. and at the same time i'm running a spectrum analysis on those pants you're wearing))_

Harlock quickened his stride across the deck.

 _((run, little man))_

'Captain?' Aristotle fell in beside Harlock as he strode towards the shuttle. 'Something the matter?'

'Nice sweater,' Harlock said without looking at it. He ascended the short ramp into the transport with Aristotle quick-stepping to keep up.

'Thanks. I found it in the stores. The sleeves are a bit long and the chest is a bit tight, but I like the way it clings to my…'

 _((does his mouth ever stop moving))_ Tochiro asked, his amused inquiry drowning out the rest of Aristotle's ramblings.

' _I thought you liked having voices to listen to.'_ Harlock slid into the pilot's seat, turning as Aristotle assumed the co-pilot's station – sure enough, his mouth was still moving. But there were shadows around his eyes that Harlock hadn't seen before. A wan tiredness that even the reflection from the accursed sweater couldn't hide. 'Sleeping much?' he asked.

'Ah...' Aristotle closed his mouth. He looked awkwardly at the captain, apparently discomfited by the question. 'Yeah,' he said. 'S'nothin. I've been having, ah, well, what you might call weird dreams.'

 _((weird is not the word i would use))_

Harlock looked sympathetically at his co-pilot and tried not to smile at the blush that tinged his cheeks.

 _((he should be blushing. he's even more depraved than you are))_

' _Depraved. That's a big word.'_

 _((it's nowhere near big enough to describe the goings on inside that head))_

' _You'll have to tell me about it,'_ Harlock relented, because if it was as interesting as Tochiro kept telling him, then maybe he did want to know.

 _((if that crazy bitch doesn't kill you, maybe i will))_

' _Maybe she's changed...'_ Harlock said mentally as he commenced launch procedures. _'Time does that to people.'_

 _((yeah. maybe she's turned over a new leaf. become a nun. rescues kittens in her spare time and eats them))_

' _Gods,'_ Harlock sighed as the transport's engines powered up. ' _Leave it alone.'_

'Leave what alone?' Aristotle's hands leapt back from the console and waved spread-fingered in the air. 'What did I do?' He turned to Harlock with an expression of bewildered affront on his face.

Harlock turned a blank stare on his co-pilot. _'Did I say that out loud?'_ he said to Tochiro.

The question was answered with a peal of laughter from the soul at the heart of Arcadia's central computer. _((you're gonna have to watch that))_

' _It would help if you would shut the hell up when I am trying to have a conversation.'_

'Captain?' Aristotle ventured again. 'Might be an idea to label the things you don't want me to touch.'

 _((that's an idea. labels. make sure you slap a few on miimé))_

Harlock clamped his jaw shut, uncertain whether to laugh or cry since Tochiro seemed hell-bent on driving him to distraction. _'_ I didn't mean to say that out loud,' hesaid to Aristotle. 'I was… wrestling with my conscience.'

'Begging the captain's pardon,' Aristotle grumbled, lowering his hands warily back to the console, 'but the captain's conscience sounds like a right pain in the arse.'

Harlock couldn't help but grin as the transport's hatch settled into place with a pneumatic hiss. He glanced out of the forward screen, making sure that Yattaran and Maji had cleared the deck.

 _((who's calling who a pain in the arse))_

Harlock powered up the little module. _'Tochiro…'_

 _((i know. shut the hell up. you'll be out of interface range soon and then you can have your whole head to yourself. that ought to make you happy))_

' _Ecstatic.'_

* * *

Miimé drifted through Harlock's room, ran her fingers across the desk, wrapped her hand around the hilt of the gravity sabre and stared at the cloak that hung unused across a chair. _He's naked,_ she thought. Vulnerable and exposed in the reach of a woman Miimé barely remembered from the time before the war. One of the four captains assigned to the Dark Matter Fleet. One of the four to whom the power to destroy worlds had been entrusted...

 _((they didn't call them all 'deathshadow' for nothing…))_

'If only they'd known,' she said as Tochiro filled the empty spaces of her mind.

 _((you knew))_

She flinched. Closed her eyes against the truth. 'I should have stopped him.'

 _((don't think about it))_

'I've tried. We've all tried.' Miimé moved to the room's bank of ornate windows and stared out at the darkness of space. 'How many years can we pretend it didn't happen? How long before our guilt and our isolation drives us all to insanity?'

 _((when we restart the universe there won't be any more guilt. there won't be anything left to remember))_

'And then what?' Miimé's eyes tracked the movement of Harlock's transport as it cleared Arcadia and headed towards the planet. 'All we are is memory...'

 _((we'll make new memories, miimé. all of us. we'll get the chance to live again... to do it all over…))_

The transport diminished to a point, was swallowed by the glare of the slowly turning planet. 'And what if we make the same mistakes again,' she said. 'What if fate can never be denied?'

Tochiro lapsed into silence and she felt him falter in her brain, the tiny tendrils of him shrinking away from the touch of her doubt.

* * *

Blessed silence. No Tochiro. No Miimé. Just the deep, dark quiet of his mind as he navigated the deeper and darker wastes of space. A man could get lost in that kind of darkness, and one day he would. The day he was ready to surrender to it.

Below them Neo Triton turned on its axis, waltzed a slow creeping waltz with inertia as the pale reaches of the atmosphere rushed up to greet them. Harlock glanced sideways at Aristotle, silent in the seat beside him as the transport skimmed the upper edge of the thermosphere, skipping and shuddering like a stone across water. He had shut his mouth the moment Harlock had accelerated the transport over the lip of the hangar bay, clamped his hands surreptitiously around his seat restraints and leant his head back against the seat in surrender. In the reflected light of the planet Harlock could see the gunner's knuckles turning white.

Just as well he was holding on.

Harlock pushed down on the column, gave the little transport a burst of speed as he tilted her nose-down into the atmosphere. The effect was akin to cresting a hill and then accelerating down the other side, only at this altitude it was more like a head-on dive towards solid ground with all the attendant internal sensations attached. Harlock had never been a fan of standard atmospheric entry protocol – it might have been gentler on the hardware, but it wasn't nearly so much fun.

Aristotle grunted as his stomach rose up into his throat, his fingers clamping harder around the seat restraints as the bones of his knuckles attempted to punch their way through his skin. He lifted momentarily in his seat, his rear-end drifting free of the chair as the internal grav system failed to compensate for the dive, and cheeped in a faintly girly voice, 'what the hell are you _doing?'_

'Flying,' Harlock said simply, jostling in his seat as the bump and grind of atmosphere took hold.

'Jiggling the shit out of me is what you're doing,' Aristotle grimaced. 'Literally.' Gravity forced him back into the chair as flames ignited across the transport's heat shield. 'Oh hell, that can't be good.'

Harlock spun the yoke and twisted the little craft into a vertical spin, forcing the flames to spark from the hull and extinguish themselves in the thin air.

'We're gonna die,' Aristotle choked out as the g-forces pressed him down into his seat and the planet spun circles across the forward port. 'And the tragedy is we're gonna do it covered in my breakfast.'

Harlock squinted at him with interest. 'You're the second man I've seen whose face has actually turned green.'

'And the first man died from it, didn't he. He had to have.' Aristotle closed his eyes to shut out the spinning planet. 'You killed him.'

' _I_ didn't.'

Aristotle opened his eyes and stared incredulous as the captain crooked him a half-smile.

'At least I took your mind off your stomach.' Harlock righted the transport and his unfortunate passenger was rewarded by a diminishing of g's and a steady horizon in his field of view. 'Better?'


	3. part 3

**The Wheel**

* * *

 **part three**

* * *

Harlock stared down at the Neo Triton dust, watching as an amorphous blob with legs skittered eagerly towards his boot then veered away at the last moment as if sniffing the danger that wafted from the worn leather. The creature began to burrow itself beneath a nearby stone and Harlock scuffed his toe in the dirt behind it, helpfully burying it in its hole. He glanced towards the clump of silver-green bushes that Aristotle had lurched towards the minute they'd hit the surface, wincing inwardly as the sound of retching floated up from the tangle of branches. He really needed to stop doing that to people.

Aristotle emerged from the bushes with an abrupt rustle of leaves, shot a glare at Harlock and disappeared into the still-open hatch of the transport. He reappeared momentarily, chugging from a flask of water as he stood at the top of the ramp.

'You throw up a lot?' Harlock asked, for future reference.

'Only when I'm strapped into a rocket with a suicidal maniac for a pilot,' Aristotle replied accusatorily, resealing the flask and wiping at his mouth with his sleeve.

Harlock kicked again at the dirt and tried not to smile. 'Wouldn't be the first time I've been called suicidal.'

'I'll bet.' Aristotle returned the flask to the interior of the transport and sealed the hatch shut. 'It's also not the first time I've thrown up on this dust-bowl.' He came to stand beside the captain, hitched up his pants and squinted towards the settlement that loomed through the distant haze. 'So what's the plan? Head into town and wait for this Komarov person to show up?'

Harlock followed Aristotle's gaze, his eye tracing the faint haze of smoke that hung over the distant town. 'Something like that.'

Aristotle sighed melodramatically and rolled his eyes. 'Getting information out of you is like getting blood from a stone.' He lowered his head to squint suspiciously at his captain. 'You do bleed, don't you?'

'It's curious how your brain works.' Harlock took a last look at the place where he'd buried the sand-slug and wondered if he should unbury it before he moved on.

'Pathological free-association.' Aristotle adjusted the holster at his hip. 'Drives people crazy. Or so I've been told.'

Harlock decided to leave the slug to its fate. 'That's what I've been told, too,' he said as he started out across the rocky plain, enjoying the sound of the dirt crunching beneath his boots and the feel of the sun warming his back. Behind him, Aristotle snorted.

* * *

 _sensor warning_

 _activate bulkhead seals_

 _sector pressure decreasing_

Tochiro coursed around Arcadia, split himself into multiples and branched out across the ship. Arcadia was still repairing the breaches to her hull where Deathshadow had slammed into her, but the repressurisation in the forward sector was taking too long to normalise. He routed the signal to the bridge and followed it along the junction lines until it hit the first mate's console. Tochiro swam along behind it, feeling vaguely fishlike as he darted from port to port and peered out through lenses that made the confines of his world look as though it were floating underwater.

There was a lone spark of heat in the cavernous bridge, the top of a bandanna'd head distorted through Tochiro's fish-eyes as he looked down from the overhead lens. He switched perspective in the blink of an eye and stared up at the first mate's double-chin from the comms camera embedded into the console. Another blink of an eye and he was flitting across the surface of Yattaran's brain, pulsing in through the conductivity afforded by the dark matter that leaked eternally from the drive.

Tochiro enjoyed being in Yattaran's head. It was similar to his own – a scientific brain peppered with trivialities. Hardwired for facts and figures and calculations, constantly moving and questing in search of a challenge – something that would bring that constantly moving mind to a sudden and liberating halt. The historical scale models were a part of that – the careful gluing together of parts somehow quieting to an unquiet mind. Tochiro slid the results of the spectrum analysis of Harlock's pants onto Yattaran's screen and had a laugh to himself as the first mate stared at them in confusion. Who needed models of antique planes when you could induce a brain fart like that?

 _sensor warning_

Tochiro darted away, his attention directed back to the collision site.

 _repressurisation failure_

Tochiro needed hands. He rechecked the bulkhead seals and open the scrubber valves, darted back to the bridge and wiped the spectrum analysis from Yattaran's screen, pinged the faulty pressure readout through instead. Loitered on the bridge just long enough to hear Yattaran open comms with Maji.

'Oi, Maji, take a look at the forward bulkheads. The pressure readings are off. Looks like the connections are incomplete.'

'On it,' Maji replied, and Tochiro darted his consciousness down ten levels to where Maji stood scratching his head at an open conduit box. The engineer closed the box and headed forward along the corridor, Tochiro following him from junction to junction, watching him through the tiny eyes of the surveillance cameras embedded in the ceiling. He liked Maji. Maji felt like the other part of him. In Maji's mind Tochiro could smell grease and steel, and he sometimes rested there while Maji worked, enjoying the sublime feeling of Maji's fingers being cut and split on shards of shining metal. But Maji required finesse – Tochiro had shimmered once into the deeper recesses of the engineer's mind and retreated back out again, hoping against hope that Maji had never known he was there. Deeper down was a long-buried hurt, a grief and loss that would be cruel for Tochiro to bring back out into the light.

Maji reached the forward bulkhead, pried off the cover of the junction box and jammed his fingers in amongst the wiring. Almost immediately there was relief from the incessant clamour of the sensor warning inside Tochiro's mind as Maji calibrated the connections, the engineer standing back and watching with satisfaction as the bulkhead seals blinked green.

 _integrity restored_

 _sector pressure normalising_

Maji closed the panel, but Tochiro was gone by then, sweeping through conduits and feed lines and back through Arcadia until he reached the central computer room. The heart of himself. His beginning and his end.

 _((miimé))_ he said, finding her curled in the very centre of his world, surrounded by the rhythmic beating of Arcadia's constant heart. _((miimé))_ he said again, but she was lost in thoughts that even he couldn't see. She stirred at her name, but Tochiro was already gone, trickling back through Arcadia's systems as he split himself into a hundred different fragments and coalesced again into a single coherent whole that stared out into the silent and crushing void of space. This was Tochiro's quietude, though it lasted but the blink of an eye.

* * *

'Lucky for you I've been here before.' Aristotle was still talking as they passed the boundary marker of the town. 'Back in the early days of my career – back when I had a career, that is.' They entered a street of low-lying buildings that appeared to have been piled together out of scrap, and he paused for a moment to get his bearings before pointing Harlock down an adjoining roadway.

'The only thing Neo Triton has going for it is its women,' Aristotle continued. 'All paid for, of course. Nothing's free on this heap, especially not sex. The weather is predictably boring and there's not much animal life to speak of. There are supposed to be birds out on the edges of the badlands, big ones, picking out the eyeballs of whoever is dumb enough to wander out that far, but I never saw one. I don't know from eyeballs, but there's money to be found in the dirt if you're willing to dig for it, and money brings women, and if it's women you're after I can recommend a very nice place.'

For some reason the travelogue had turned back to women again, and Harlock glanced up at one of the objects of Aristotle's wandering eyes, attractive in a hard-luck kind of way and with a boldness to her that Harlock would have found tempting a long time ago. She stepped inquiringly out of her doorway at his glance and he looked ruefully away. Aristotle, he noticed, was doing no such thing.

'Don't worry.' Harlock snagged Aristotle's elbow and steered him further down the street. 'The woman we're going to meet will be more than either of us can handle.'

'I'm glad you brought that up,' Aristotle said as he scuffed reluctantly alongside his captain, 'because I wasn't quite sure of the protocol for questioning one's captain about his love life, and I damn sure wasn't going to ask Yattaran what the protocol might be. Didn't think I could handle another lecture, 'specially if it was another lecture about minding my own business, because, you know, I've had more than enough of those in the last couple months. So…' he looked at Harlock as they strode down the dusty street, 'from the stink-eye the lady captain was giving you, I gather you knew each other. You know…. in the Biblical sense...'

Harlock turned to find Aristotle's blue eyes staring curiously at him and returned his gaze wordlessly back to the street.

'I'll take that as a 'yes' on the Biblical front,' Aristotle replied irreverently. 'How long ago,' he pressed with stubborn persistence.

 _Too long,_ Harlock wanted to say, even though after all these years it still felt like only yesterday. For some reason all his mistakes felt like only yesterday. He stopped outside a bar, inhaling the odour of stale liquor that wafted out on a breeze so stiff you could taste it.

'Just what I said,' Aristotle muttered as he followed the captain's silent gaze toward the bar. 'Blood from a stone.'

Harlock gave him a sideways glance. If the rookie wanted blood from the stone, then the stone would just this once oblige. 'From before your grandfather was born,' he replied impulsively, watching as Aristotle's eyes widened in surprise. Harlock could practically see the mental math going on inside the blond head. 'I thought you said you were good with numbers.'

'I said I was good with formulae. And shh. I'm concentrating.' Aristotle raised his hands and began counting off fingers.

Harlock turned away from the display of advanced calculus and mounted the single step to the swing door, pausing on the threshold at the chime of his comms.

' _Deathshadow 3 has made orbit,'_ Yattaran announced through the comms. _'Took her sweet time…'_

Harlock glanced back at Aristotle, still in the street with his fingers in the air and an expression of awe and disbelief spreading slowly across his face.

'You know your orders,' Harlock replied to the mate. 'Keep a distance and keep the main cannon armed and on target.'

' _Aye, Captain. She's requesting your location.'_

Harlock looked up at the sky, as if he were somehow able to see Deathshadow up there, out beyond the limits of the hazy yellow air. 'Give it to her.'

* * *

Yattaran closed the ship to shore connection and pinged Harlock's coordinates to Deathshadow 3. He didn't need to speak to the lady captain for that. Although… maybe he should be currying some favour. Deathshadow 3 was a relic, a remnant of the most powerful battlefleet ever built, and what Yattaran wouldn't give for a tour of that beauty…. He magnified the image on the overhead screen and sighed with something that sounded very much like lust. Seeing a ship like that was the stuff of fantasy, akin to coming across a Jaeger or a Yamato.

'Hey,' Maji said. 'You're drooling.'

'Yeah.' Yattaran wiped absently at his mouth with the back of his hand and indicated the screen with a nod of his head. 'Look at her… she's beautiful.'

'Beautiful alright. And dangerous – she's got almost as much armament as we have. Just make sure you keep us well out of range.'

Yattaran returned his attention to his console. 'No fear of that. This damn ship is running itself again.'

Maji scratched at the back of his head. 'Captain must have automated some systems over the years,' the engineer said, 'though I'm damned if I can find the automation hubs.' He glanced around the bridge superstitiously. 'Although I haven't given up looking…'

Yattaran cracked a kink loudly out of his neck. 'Arcadia has as many secrets as her captain. Although…' he mirrored the engineer's superstitious glance around the bridge and made sure the bird wasn't within listening range, '… some of them are maybe not so secret.'

Maji raised a long-suffering eyebrow at the first mate. 'Oh shit…. what have you been up to now?'

'Nothing,' the first mate protested innocently. 'I just happened to be in the sublevels of the system when I stumbled on a set of data files.' He beckoned the engineer to his station. 'Look.' The readout on his screen changed. 'These are from Arcadia's original commission. Look – crew complements, mechanical specs…' The words trailed off as he toggled through the files.

Maji glanced down at the screen. 'You showed me that before. I thought you saved a copy of the specs?'

'I did.' Yattaran stopped his exploration of the files. 'And then they disappeared, remember? Right out from under my nose.'

'That was odd, I'll give you that.' Maji chuckled, remembering the look of affront on Yattaran's face when his screen had died. 'You said the system crashed when the power went out.'

'That's what I thought. And I figured the files must have been corrupted when it did. But then I found them again, buried in another place. And I found something else…'

Now Maji was interested. He leaned closer to the first mate. 'What?'

'This,' Yattaran replied with a secretive flourish, his voice low although they were the only occupants of the bridge. 'Captain's data stash. Fleet information. Mission parameters for the Homecoming War. Communiqués from Gaia Command. Sealed orders… encrypted packets… everything. Just as it must have been when Arcadia – or should I say Deathshadow 4 – was an active battleship. And when,' he added, somewhat sensationally, 'Harlock was commander of the fleet.'

'Damn,' Maji whispered as the files flashed one by one across the screen. 'He really is the same man, then?' He glanced at the empty chair behind them. 'Captain really is the Harlock from the Homecoming War?'

'You tell me.' Yattaran stopped his random scrolling at Harlock's personnel file and peered down at his ident photo. 'Looks like the same man to me.'

'But…' Maji said, following Yattaran's gaze, '…that means he must be what, a hundred years old?'

Yattaran stared at the screen, at the face that looked determinedly up out of it. 'More than that, if the age on this file is correct.'

'But history says the entire fleet was destroyed during the battle. No survivors.'

Yattaran snorted derisively. 'History is a lie, always has been. And since when did you believe the propaganda the Sanction doles out? Think about it,' he said, 'the Deathshadow Fleet was the most powerful ever built, and the Sanction wants us to believe that it was destroyed by a bunch of colony hacks trying to return to Earth after the Diaspora?' He snorted again, this time with disgust. 'You've seen what the colonies are capable of – you think they could provide any kind of resistance against a single Deathshadow class battleship, let alone four? Taking the colonists out must have been like picking fleas from a cat's back.' He pointed at the real-time image of Deathshadow 3 where she drifted along the curving edge of the planet. 'It looks like the Deathshadow fleet didn't just survive the war, but for some reason it departed the Solar System. For good. And with at least some of their crews intact – though who knows what happened to all of them. Look – ' The screen refreshed beneath his fingertips, Harlock's image replaced by that of Ekaterina Komarov.

'It's her.' Maji stared down at the face that looked up from the screen. The woman looked permanently angry, dark hair framing a face that, despite its prettiness, looked as though it would crawl over glass to get what it wanted. 'What the hell happened to them?'

'No idea. But whatever happened, it happened to the entire fleet.' Yattaran returned his attention to the screen and read out loud from the file: 'Komarov, Ekaterina. Rank: Captain. Commission: Deathshadow 3. Commanding Officer – '

The lights died and plunged the bridge into sudden darkness.

'Shit.' Yattaran cursed as the lights flickered back on, and he smacked at the console with the flat of his hand when the screen failed to come back to life. 'No! Damn ship has done it to me _again!'_

* * *

'Okay, so you last saw her, what, eighty years ago. Ninety? I can't be sure because I don't have enough fingers – '

Harlock departed the sphere of Aristotle's ramblings and sat himself down at a table near the bar. The walk into town had been longer than expected and the seat beneath him was firmer than he might have liked, but still it felt good to have the pull of planetary gravity working against his muscles. He leaned back in the chair as Aristotle caught up with him, the rookie's mouth still running as he slid his hard-muscled body into the seat opposite.

' – so why, after all this time, was she lookin' at you like you were a snake that just crawled out of its hole? Because, I mean – ' Aristotle swept his gaze across the room and signalled to the barkeep, ' – you're not the only one with a bad relationship or two tucked up tight in his closet. At what point do women give up hating on us?' He leaned back as a waitress deposited a pair of shot-glasses unceremoniously on the table in front of him before he could even open his mouth to order. 'Did you order this,' he said to Harlock as the waitress slopped brown fluid from an even browner bottle into the glasses.

'House special,' the woman announced as Aristotle reached for one of the half-filled glasses and swirled the liquor around in his glass, grinning appreciatively at the scent of what smelled like old-fashioned bourbon and seemingly oblivious to the rough-edged grifters that populated the bar and were hunched sour-faced over their drinks. He sucked back the bourbon and grimaced around the fire that burned down his throat. 'Don't let the look on my face fool you,' he croaked around the pain, 'that is some seriously good shit.'

Harlock downed his drink and tried not to let the burn register on his face. Aristotle snorted and drained the last drops from his glass. 'You are one hard bastard. That has to be hurting you. C'mon, let it out…'

Harlock put the empty glass back on the table. 'Pain is a weakness to be exploited.'

'No shit,' Aristotle agreed. 'But it's also what makes us human. And I figure you must still be human underneath all that leather, else you wouldn't be sitting here waiting to meet a woman who looked about ready to castrate you with her teeth.'

Harlock couldn't help the smile that tugged at his lips. 'You wouldn't be far wrong,' he said, wondering how perceptive Aristotle really was. And how many secrets he was going to be able to keep from him.

'So tell me,' Aristotle said, since he really wanted to know, 'what exactly are we doing here?'

Harlock's fingers toyed with the empty glass on the table. 'Ending something that should have ended a long time ago. And making sure I don't have another enemy breathing eternally down my neck.'

'Man,' Aristotle said with a heartfelt sigh, 'if anybody needs to get off the wheel, it's you.'

Harlock raised a quizzical brow.

The gunner gestured towards himself as exhibit number one. 'My mother was into philosophy, as you can no doubt tell.' He leaned back in his chair and signalled the waitress for another round. 'She said life was a wheel. An endlessly turning cycle. And we're trapped on it, doomed to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.'

The waitress reappeared and leaned apathetically between them with the bottle. Aristotle's amiable grin was met with an obligatory twitch of her lip and then she was gone.

Harlock studied the fresh liquor that had appeared in his glass. 'And how do you get off this wheel?'

'Ah.' Aristotle shrugged and tore his gaze from the woman's retreating ass. 'The moment you recognise you're on the wheel, you're on your way to getting off.' He belched as he reached for his second round. 'Of course, that was my mother speaking. My father said that fate was not something to be tempted, and that whoever was stupid enough to try and stop the wheel would end up getting his fingers broke.'

'Maybe some fingers need to be broken.'

'But preferably not ours, eh.' Aristotle leaned back in his chair and eyed the captain speculatively. 'Is that what this oscillator plan is all about? Breaking the Coalition's fingers?'

Harlock raised his refilled glass and drained it in a single swallow. 'It's about stopping the wheel,' he said around the burn in his throat. 'Resetting the cycle. Turning back time and starting things over.'

'Turning back time, hey?' Aristotle nodded sagely, his voice filled with kind of expression a father has when his son tells him he's off to kill the dragon. 'Impressive. Possibly a little grandiose. Others might say crazy. Just make sure your – '

He turned to look at the dark-clad figure that had arrived at the table, allowed his eyes to wander from the slim thighs on up through a narrow waist and gentle bosom to a face that he, personally, would call attractive with a hint of terror. The woman stared wordlessly down at him as he looked up into her clear, timeless eyes and resisted the urge to get his fingers out again and start counting.

'This must be your noon appointment, Captain,' he said politely as he rose from his chair and proffered it towards Komarov with a gentlemanly flourish, saying nothing when she coldly ignored the gesture. He passed on by her to the bar and perched himself on a stool, leaned his elbows back against the counter and stared towards them thoughtfully.

'I see you brought a dog,' Ekaterina said, settling herself into the vacated chair.

'Careful,' Harlock replied. 'Dogs have excellent hearing.'

She smiled condescendingly at him. 'Too afraid to come alone?'

'Something like that.' Harlock studied her where she sat, with the dull light from the bar reflecting from the pale blue of her eyes and highlighting the sharp edges of her face. She looked drawn, as if the horrors of the years had carved their marks beneath the smoothness of her skin.

'You've changed,' she said, studying him, and he wondered if she could see the horrors that lurked beneath his own skin.

'It's been a long time.'

'Time,' she said, as if she didn't like the word. 'It means nothing to me anymore.'

'And yet it means everything to me.'

She mused on that. Made an attempt at a smile. Said, 'how do you get a drink around here?' and leant back in her chair as the waitress walked apathetically in their direction. 'You always were drawn to the less sophisticated establishments,' she remarked as her drink arrived and she watched the waitress walk away.

He didn't reply, remembering a time when he'd admired Ekaterina's cool aloofness and made it his mission to break the wall of haughtiness she'd so carefully built around herself. And he'd broken her as he knew he inevitably would. Penetrated her defences with his unrelenting lust, and oh, how she'd hated him for it.

'You lost your eye,' Ekaterina was saying, and he wished she wouldn't look so closely at his face.

'During the battle,' he replied, remembering the flash and burn of the weapons fire that had taken out the bridge, and the searing pain of the explosion that had taken out his eye. 'When the fleet turned on us.'

'You _look_ young,' she said witheringly, 'but you have the faltering memory of a decrepit old man. You turned on _us._ Or have you forgotten that?'

His lips clamped tight together, but he didn't look away.

' _I_ haven't forgotten,' she was continuing in her cold, hard voice, her cold, hard eyes blazing now with something more than anger. 'You were our commanding officer. Commander of the Fleet. And you turned your weapons on us. On _me.'_

He stared at her small, angry mouth and was overwhelmed by a sudden urge to kiss it. 'Kat…'

'Don't call me that. You're a murderer, a billion times over.'

His gaze slid to Aristotle at the bar, but the gunner hadn't heard, his attention neatly divided between them and the waitress as she bent across a nearby table to wipe the condensation rings from its surface. He'd appropriated a cigar from somewhere and had it jammed unlit in his mouth, angled impudently towards the ceiling.

 _Murderer._ The word echoed in Harlock's ears, and he turned back to find Ekaterina staring at him, her lips moving in slow motion as she battered him with the truths he'd been avoiding for almost a century.

'The fleet,' she was saying. 'Destroyed. The _Earth,'_ she said, as incredulous as she must have been the moment she first saw the blasted sphere of the planet, _'destroyed._ Did you do that? _Is that what you did?'_

'Kat…' Would it help if he explained it was an accident? That their calculations were incorrect? That the dark matter was far too great for Miimé to control?

'I said _don't,'_ she spat, turning her gaze contemptuously away. She lifted her glass and stared into it, as if seeing the horrors of the past moving inside the tiny sea of liquor.

'When we broke free of the maelstrom,' she said, putting the drink back untouched on the table, 'we were alone. The entire fleet was gone. For years we thought we were the only survivors… until we caught a glimpse of you. It was distant, and fleeting, and Deathshadow 4 was so altered we couldn't really be sure... But then we heard the rumours.' She looked up at him. 'Tall tales about the legendary Captain Harlock. A phantom, a bad memory from the past.'

His name fell from her mouth as if it had burned a hole in her tongue, and she looked surprised for a moment, as though the word had hurt her. 'It's taken us years to catch up with you – every time we locked onto your signature you were gone. We were too slow. And our navigation was always just that little bit off – the dark matter drive is difficult to control without the Nibelung. But it can be done…if you have enough of the matter in your blood.'

'Maer is dead?' He looked at her, expecting the worst, because Miimé had felt nothing where the Nibelung had once been.

'I can only hope,' Ekaterina replied bitterly. 'The disloyal bitch abandoned me. Took a lieutenant and a shuttle and disappeared into the jungle on Jura. I hope the pair of them got swallowed by a borja plant.' A smile tugged impulsively at the edges of her lips and she looked searchingly at his face. 'Does Miimé still live?'

He said nothing, watched as a light burned bright in her eyes.

'Of course she lives,' Ekaterina answered for him. 'I can see it on your face.' She glanced towards Aristotle and the gunner stared back at her, met the contempt of her gaze with the watchfulness of his own. 'How many survivors?' she asked.

'Enough,' Harlock lied, remembering the dead that had littered his ship. And Tochiro among them.

She turned back to him. 'Half my crew were lost,' she said, 'and those that survived were maimed, most beyond repair. Many to the point of death. But still,' she leaned towards him, her hatred battering against him like a wave, _'they would not die.'_

He stared impassively at her, felt his hands growing hot inside his gloves.

'How do you put such souls out of their misery?' she asked him, and he saw, then, the horrors that had scarred her, and the source of the darkness that lurked beneath her skin.

'Have you ever thought about it,' she continued, 'about all the ways of making us die?'

 _There were times,_ he wanted to tell her, _when thoughts like that consumed me._ He bit down on the inside of his lip in case he inadvertently said the words out loud.

'Many of them we consigned to the vacuum of space,' she was saying, her eyes glazing over as she dreamed her dreams of death. 'Some of them willing. Some of them kicking and screaming…' Her lip twitched, as if she could still hear their voices as they were forced into the airlocks. 'Some took a transport and flew themselves into the sun. Some burned themselves in atmosphere, tiny candles extinguishing themselves in the dark. The chief engineer,' she said, hypnotising him with her words, 'delivered himself naked to the engine core as we watched.' Her eyes drifted unfocussed across the room. 'I can still smell him burning, even now.'

She lapsed into silence. Lifted her glass and took a single, delicate sip. 'For years I dreamed about killing you.' She looked up at him. _'If_ I could kill you.'

He watched as she returned the glass to the table, realised that a curse far greater than death had overtaken Deathshadow 3 in the darkness after the war.

'And now?' he asked, though he didn't want to know.

'Now I dream about hurting you.' She smiled then, showed her sharp, even teeth. Reached down towards her ankle as if scratching at an itch. Said, coyly, 'but I'd still like to try killing you.' She leapt abruptly across the table, the cold steel of a blade brandished unexpectedly in her hand.

 _Too slow,_ Harlock thought as Ekaterina's knife lanced brightly towards him. _Too fucking slow…_ He kicked out with his leg, hit the table with his foot and tipped his chair back from the onrushing blade.

 _Maybe he didn't think she'd do it._

The bar tilted on its axis as he fell back towards the floor, weightless in his chair as the knife slashed on towards him.

 _Maybe he wanted her to do it._

Ekaterina cleared the table, was on him, the knife slicing towards him as they fell in slow-motion to the floor.

 _Maybe he wanted to feel something._

He brought his hands up to stop her, felt the blade carve through his fingers on its way to his throat.

 _Because maybe…_

He twisted away, the knife piercing through his jacket as he thwarted the thrust for his jugular.

… _when you were closest to death…_

The blade entered his chest, parted skin and flesh, brought blood welling hot from the wound.

… _you were the most alive._

There was a blur of movement in the corner of his eye, the crash of a stool hitting the floor as Aristotle lunged towards them.

 _Too late,_ Harlock thought, the bar erupting into chaos as the knife plunged deep into his body and Ekaterina smiled her feral, cat-like smile.

'Tell me,' she crooned, his lover again as she dug the knife into him and kissed him hot on the mouth. 'Do you taste blood?'


	4. part 4

**The Wheel**

* * *

 **part four**

* * *

There was no pain at first. Just a vague sensation of cold as the blade slid into him, unimpeded by flesh or bone, an ice-cold sharpness that bespoke of negative density steel. Or worse, a gravity blade that was tearing him apart at the molecular level as Ekaterina Komarov dug it hard into his chest.

'Tell me,' she said as they fell to the floor, the rosebud of her lips just millimetres from his own. 'Do you taste blood?' The knife moved as she spoke, twisted, and he felt it push closer to the beating of his heart. She kissed him, pressed her mouth hot against his own, and maybe he did taste blood.

'Jesus H. Fucking _Christ!'_

The oath came from somewhere above him, simultaneous with the heavy scuff of boots near his ear and the unexpected flash and burn of blaster fire close to his face. He blinked against the flare, yellow-hot and searing as Ekaterina flew bodily from him, Aristotle's well-aimed bolt catching her square in the chest and flinging her sprawling to the floor. The knife went with her, her hand clenched white in a rictus around the hilt as the weapon tore itself from Harlock's chest, a flash of bright metal that arced in a rain of dripping blood. _Now_ Harlock felt pain. The sting of the steel as it left his body and the hot rush of blood that filled the void of its passing. His heart faltered deep inside him and he rolled to his side, grasped the wound with one hand and felt his fingers fill instantly with blood.

'Why won't she stay the fuck _dead?!'_

The incredulous cry now came from somewhere beside him, and Harlock was dimly aware of another flash of fire. Of the panicked trample around him as the bar emptied of its patrons. Of Ekaterina rising to her feet as Aristotle fired again. And again. And again and again and again, until at last she lay sprawled on her back with her eyes unblinking as they gazed toward the ceiling.

'Damn,' Aristotle said, unbelieving, 'but that bitch was hard to kill.'

'She isn't dead.'

'Damn well looks dead.' Aristotle fired another bolt into her chest just to be sure. He holstered his gun and turned to find the captain crawling to his feet.

'Jeezus. She got you?' The gunner shouldered his way carefully beneath Harlock's arm, his blue eyes clouding with concern and darting from Harlock's face to the hand clenched against his chest. 'Can you walk?'

Harlock nodded, not protesting when he was steered towards the door. A scattering of patrons had stayed to watch the drama unfold, and to gawk unashamedly at the body that now sprawled wide-eyed on the floor. The barkeep eyed them sullenly as they lurched past the bar, a toothpick gripped between his thick white teeth and his grizzled face pinched tight with irritation.

* * *

Feydar Zone peeled his tall lean body out of the chair he'd been sitting in, dropped a handful of credits on the pitted surface of the table and strolled the few short steps to the unmoving body of Ekaterina Komarov. She stretched unblinking on the wood-slat floor, one arm entwined in an overturned chair, the table over which she'd crawled tipped wildly to one side, and one booted foot twitching randomly in the congealing pool of Harlock's blood. Zone stared down at her pallid face, glanced briefly at the blaster burns scored black and red across her chest, and looked disgustedly away.

'Get up,' he said, kicking at her with the toe of his boot. 'Move.'

Ekaterina's foot stopped twitching, her head turning slowly by degrees as the pupils in her wide pale eyes constricted. She blinked up at him, dazed, as he stared white-faced down at her.

'You were supposed to seduce him, not stab him.'

'Nnh,' she said, her hands fluttering panicked to her chest as her last waking memory jolted to the surface of her brain. 'Bastard tried to kill me,' she croaked, remembering the hard blue eyes of the blond man with the blaster.

'You deserved it,' Zone said, his expression unreadable behind the purple tint of his glasses. 'Stupid bitch.'

'I love you too.' She reached towards him with a blood-stained hand. 'Help me up.'

His nose wrinkled in disgust. 'We had a plan,' he snarled, not letting it go. He made an impatient noise with his tongue when she didn't answer, clasped his unwilling fingers around her own and lifted her bodily from the floor. 'What possessed you?'

She stood, swaying, as he removed a handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and wiped fiercely at the blood on his fingers. Her blood, Harlock's blood, it didn't matter. It all made him sick.

'You don't really expect an answer,' she said, waiting while Zone dabbed ineffectually at the stains on his hand, and smirking when he finally gave up and dropped the ruined handkerchief to the floor.

* * *

'I need a moment.' Harlock's feet dragged on the rough pavement and Aristotle paused to let him lean against a wall, lowered him carefully down until he was sitting with his back against the brickwork.

'Don't die on me,' Aristotle said, glancing up and down the narrow laneway to make sure they hadn't been followed. 'Yattaran will skin my hide and roast my tender arse for lunch if I come back with you in a bag.'

Harlock tugged at the zipper on his jacket. 'I won't die here,' he said, looking up at the yellow smoke-stained sky and wincing as he opened the jacket to reveal his sodden undershirt. 'This isn't the place.'

'I see,' Aristotle replied, the calmness of his voice at odds with the panic that he felt rising in his throat. 'So it's not a matter of when, it's a matter of where.' He brushed the captain's fingers aside and peeled the shirt away from a dark and gaping wound that pulsed blood at the same steady speed as the beating of Harlock's heart.

'Shit,' he said when he saw the gouge Komarov had made when she twisted the knife. Gravity blade, he could tell, and those things weren't designed to heal easy. He had the sudden, unbidden thought that the bourbon he'd just swallowed might be making preparations for a surprise reappearance. It wasn't the blood. It wasn't even the pale edge of bone that the blade had revealed. Aristotle had seen worse things than that – the kinds of unfortunate accidents that occur when heavy machinery meets the tender pulp of human flesh. Once he'd seen a man cut completely in half, sliced cleanly through with his intestines hanging out and his feet twitching in their death throes a three full metres away from his silent screaming mouth. Aristotle had managed to stomach that without so much as a liquid hiccup, but he found himself having trouble with a stab wound for the simple fact of the man that the wound was stabbed into.

'I can't tell you how happy I am to hear you won't be dying on this shithole,' he babbled inanely as he attempted to fill the void of his swelling panic. He tore his sweater off over his head, balled it up tight and pressed it hard against Harlock's wound. 'But do you know where it will be, maybe, because, do you think, it might be an idea to avoid the place altogether?' He glanced up and down the deserted alley again, lifted the sweater and peered intently at the slowly-oozing wound. 'Um…' he said, not sure if he should bring it up or not, 'should you be leaking blue smoke?'

'How deep is it?' Harlock asked, because he'd seen the green rising in Aristotle's face, and if the blood kept coming then soon he wouldn't have enough left to move. 'Can you close the wound?'

'With what? My fingers?'

Harlock's curt nod elicited a melodramatic groan. 'With my fingers, he says.' Aristotle dropped the ruined sweater onto the road and slicked his fingers across Harlock's chest. 'I liked that sweater,' he grumbled petulantly as he pushed the gaping edges of the wound together.

'I didn't,' Harlock said as Aristotle's hands pressed hot against his skin.

'You said you did,' Aristotle retorted, miffed, his eyebrows rising as Harlock's wound began to knit itself together with the same speed as he'd seen Arcadia replace the metal in her hull. Faint tendrils of blue wisped wraith-like around his fingers, tingling slightly against his skin. 'Damn,' he said, squinting down and still not believing it.

Harlock leaned his head back against the wall as Aristotle worked on holding him together. It wouldn't take long, but the pressure on his chest hurt like all hell and he was having trouble trying not to focus on the pain. Not to mention the unsettling sensation of human hands on his body in god knows how long. 'I forgot,' he said, as he stared into the emptiness of the street, 'how warm human hands could be.'

'Don't get any ideas,' Aristotle muttered from the corner of his mouth. 'I've heard about pirates.'

'Mmph,' Harlock said, more groan than laugh, and instantly regretting it.

'Sorry.' Aristotle turned to look back the way they had come. There was the distant sound of running feet, the isolated bark of an alarm that faded abruptly into silence. Figures moved across the junction, but nobody turned their heads to look down the street. Nobody was witness to the man bleeding quietly in the dim coolness of the alley.

Aristotle turned back to the captain, his mouth quirking disparagingly. 'It's amazing how ignorant people can be. How much effort they put into pretending there's nothing beyond the six square feet that surrounds them.'

'It's better that way.' Harlock shifted against the brickwork. 'As soon as men start looking towards the horizon they start thinking about ways to conquer it.'

'Damn straight.' Aristotle lifted his fingers and checked the progress of the wound, shook his head incredulously and covered it up again. 'Space travel is the worst thing that ever happened to us. We should have stayed on the ground, with our feet planted in the earth the way God intended.'

'God?' Harlock repeated softly, with his head still resting against the wall.

The gunner's mouth twisted wryly. 'Well, something had to put us here, because we sure as hell didn't spring up out of nothing.'

Harlock's lips quirked with amusement. 'You're a scientist.'

'True. But the more I see, the less I understand. The universe isn't what we think it is.' Aristotle looked pointedly down at Harlock's nearly-healed chest. 'Did you mean it when you said she wasn't dead?'

A wind blew through the alley, funnelled itself fitfully along the narrow pavement and shifted the hair that framed the captain's face. Harlock looked uncomfortably away from the question in Aristotle's blue eyes.

The gunner laughed cynically, a short sharp burst that made its exit through his nose. 'What you seem reluctant to tell me is that crazy-face is like you. That she's…' he hesitated to say it, '…one of the undead.'

Aristotle's voice had dropped an octave on the last word, and he sounded so perturbed by the thought that Harlock couldn't help but smile. 'I can die,' he reassured him, turning his face to the wind. 'If somebody really wants me dead.'

Aristotle stared at Harlock's unguarded features, at the jagged scar that scored its way across his cheek and over the aquiline nose. The scar trailed away at the periphery of the patch over the captain's dead eye, and Aristotle peered closely at its edge, saw the vaguest hint of tortured skin beneath the leather.

Harlock turned back to Aristotle, unsurprised to find the gunner watching him. 'Time to move.'

* * *

'Harlock is in trouble.'

Yattaran jumped and spun on his heels, turning to find Miimé hovering a few paces behind him. She was looking directly at him, which led Yattaran to the inescapable and nerve-wracking conclusion that she must have been talking to _him._

'Excuse me?' he said, peering at her through the thick lenses of his glasses. It seemed to him that she was greener than usual. Or was it blue? In some languages there would be a word for the green-white-blue of her, but for now he would have to settle with –

'Harlock is in trouble,' she said again, her glow intensifying and an unmistakable crease of concern forming between her eyes.

A similar crease formed in the fleshy mound of skin between Yattaran's eyes as he turned back to his console. The captain's transport had broken free of atmosphere about thirty seconds ahead of Mime's unexpected pronouncement, visible only as a tiny moving blip on the scanner as it headed back in Arcadia's direction. It was too far away even for visual contact, so how could the Nibelung possibly know if anybody on board was in trouble or not?

'Don't take your eyes off Deathshadow,' Yattaran rumbled in Maji's general direction as he attempted to suppress the goosebumps that crept a shivering trail up his spine. He glanced again at Miimé as the alien beauty stared inscrutably at him, wondering if this was maybe some weird-ass kind of alien prank and he simply wasn't getting the joke. But on the off-chance that this _wasn't_ a joke…

'Captain,' he said, breaking the protocol on comms as he opened a secure channel to the transport. 'Everything alright?'

Dead air followed. Then static, and Yattaran began to feel the faintest stirrings of trepidation. And then Aristotle's reluctant voice came over the comms. 'Kind of not really.'

'Shit.' Yattaran slammed his hand against his console and exploded from his station with surprising speed. 'The bridge is yours,' he barked at Maji as he hastened from the command.

* * *

Aristotle surprised everyone with the smoothness of his landing, not least himself, since the transport was unfamiliar and he was in such a hurry to get back to the ship. But then… his cargo was precious, and maybe he hadn't realised that until today. He looked across at Harlock, relaxed in the co-pilot's chair, his one eye closed and his breathing calm and the blood still drying on the front of his jacket.

'C'mon,' he said. 'We're home.'

Harlock nodded, his eye still closed. 'I can feel it.'

It was true, even Aristotle could feel it.

'Need help?' he asked, reaching out a hand to help him from the chair, surprised at the ease with which Harlock rose to his feet. Strike that. Unsurprised, since Aristotle had seen way too many surprising things that day already. His eyes tracked the faint traceries of dark matter that seemed to gather in the air around them, wisps of blue that focussed unerringly on the captain and coalesced around his heart. Aristotle followed one of the wisps with a finger and pulled his hand back as a spark of static shot from the captain. The same kind of spark that Miimé was forever stinging him with.

'Damn,' Aristotle muttered, shaking the sting from his fingers as he heaved himself out of his chair to stand beside the captain. Harlock's gaze drifted out of focus for a moment, his lips creasing in what could have been a smile. Or maybe it was a frown. Aristotle diverted his attention to shutting down the systems, because he had the distinct impression the captain was about to commune with his conscience again and he didn't want it to get awkward.

The external pressure sensors cycled their way to completion as the atmosphere in the hangar deck equalised, and Aristotle leaned forward to peer out of the forward port. Across the vast expanse of deck he could just make out Yattaran's face mashed almost flat against the glass set into the hangar door, his mouth working furiously, and Aristotle fancied he could hear the abuse those fat flappy lips were spewing at him even from here.

'He'll get over it,' Harlock said from close behind him, making him jump inside his skivvies.

'How did you know what I…?' Aristotle turned to find the captain observing Yattaran with almost as much interest as he was. 'Never mind,' Aristotle muttered beneath his breath. The captain was psychic. Miimé was psychic. The whole damn ship was psychic. 'Sure. He'll get over it,' he continued, less than confidently, 'but will I? I'm delicate, you know.'

Harlock clapped a hand on his shoulder, and Aristotle's mouth quirked wryly – as reassuring as the gesture was, it held a simple and unmistakeable message: _you're on your own._

'Hmh,' Aristotle said at the same time as the external atmosphere equalised and the indicator on the console chimed green and Yattaran fairly exploded into the hangar, scuttling in at the same time as Harlock opened the hatch of the transport. The mate came to a screeching halt as the captain descended the short ramp that extended to the deck, his eyes darting jerkily from Harlock's bloodied clothes to his face and back again, with a brief detour to glare accusingly at Aristotle where he hovered in the open hatch. Harlock's long legs had taken him all the way down the ramp in the time that Yattaran's eyes had been preoccupied with all that darting around, and the captain was halfway across the hangar before Yattaran had a chance for his mouth to catch up with his brain.

'Captain,' he called out, belatedly registering Harlock's murmured greeting and the captain's one-handed wave of acknowledgement as he strode across the hangar without looking back. Yattaran's mouth closed and opened and closed again as he spun to face Aristotle, his eyes narrowing threateningly behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

Aristotle ducked to avoid the double-barrels of Yattaran's myopic glare as he cautiously descended the ramp towards the glowering mate. Maybe if he didn't look at that face, it would go away. _Schrödinger's Face,_ he smirked to himself with a certain amount of self-amusement and a not-inordinate amount of pride at the boundless breadth of his intellect. _If I don't look at it, it isn't really there –_ nnh!

Yattaran's fist grazed its way across Aristotle's cheek, missing the true target of his infuriatingly smirking mouth by the merest of clean-shaven centimetres.

'Hey!' Aristotle teetered back from the blow, Yattaran's fist carrying all the unadulterated weight of the first mate's ample poundage. 'You _hit_ me!'

'And I hope you enjoyed it 'coz lookout, I'm gonna hit you again!' Yattaran balled his fist up ready for another strike. 'You had one job to do, Rookie. _One_ job! And you fucked it up!'

Aristotle danced two steps backward, the hot sting of the mate's fist still burning across his cheek. 'I'll give you that one,' he said, testing his jaw to make sure it still worked and that everything was still in place. He ran his tongue along his teeth and didn't taste blood. Lucky. 'But one is all you get. You weren't there. You didn't see her.'

'Bah,' Yattaran spat, his disgust growing by the minute. 'A woman!' The pudgy legs lurched him forward and Aristotle was surprised by how fast the first mate's bulk could be when it was shored up by red-faced anger. _'A woman!'_

Aristotle took another step back. He hated doing it, hated giving in to the mate, but he'd felt the force behind Yattaran's fist. He wasn't sure he'd be the one still standing if they got into a knock-down fight, and he didn't currently feel like experimenting with his theory. 'You didn't _see_ her.'

The pudgy lips sneered disgustedly 'I've seen women before.'

'Not this one. This one was different. She was like _him.'_

'Whaddaya mean,' Yattaran said, backing the gunner up against the still-warm skin of transport. 'Like who?'

'Like the _captain,_ you baboon!'

The fist faltered in the air and the mate's thick lips tightened into a hard and disbelieving line of contempt.

'You should have seen her,' Aristotle continued, taking advantage of the lull in the tide of Yattaran's anger. 'She was _fast._ You've seen how fast the captain is. She was on him before I could even blink. I mean, I was there, I was right _there!_ I had my gun out, I was firing, but she was on him before anybody knew what was happening.'

He was blabbering, he knew it, but it was the first time he'd really thought about it, the first time he'd had a chance to evaluate it in his head, and he realised only now that he hadn't actually seen her move, that he'd only known she was moving when he'd heard the shatter of glass as the table hit the floor and seen her crouched over the captain with the knife buried in his chest.

Yattaran stood glaring at him with the breath coming hard out of his mouth and the blue eyes blinking behind the lenses of his glasses and it wouldn't have surprised Aristotle if the mate had snorted steam out of his flaring nostrils and pawed one foot against the floor in preparation for a charge, but for the life of him Aristotle couldn't stop his mouth from moving because that was what it did when he found himself chin deep in shit and sinking fast.

'I tried,' he was still saying, convincing himself even less than he was convincing Yattaran, 'but she was so fast. And I shot her, I did, and she was dead and on the floor and six times I shot her or maybe it was seven, no, it was definitely eight, but I think…' He trailed off, his eyes following Yattaran's fist as it was lowered slowly by degrees.

'You think what?' the mate asked, looking properly at the rookie as he stood butted up against the transport in his undershirt and the whole of him stained and streaked with the captain's blood.

'I don't know.' Aristotle shook his head and rubbed a hand across his still stinging jaw, regretting that he'd even opened his mouth. 'I don't know _what_ I think.'

* * *

Harlock ignored Miimé as she trailed along behind him, swung open the great double doors to his room and left her to close them as he walked to his desk. He poured himself wine from an open bottle, filled the glass to the brim and swallowed it swiftly down, grateful for the familiar, comforting warmth as it tracked its way down his throat.

Another glass was poured and another mouthful swallowed as the bird waddled out from some dark corner and rubbed commiserations against his leg. Harlock passed a hand across its downy head and met Miimé's eyes across the dim expanse of the room. She watched him silently, knowing better than to interrupt when he was licking at his wounds. Her pale eyes flickered to his chest and darted just as quickly away – like all her kind she shied away from blood, and pain, and it was still too fresh in his head for her to venture in and test it, even for a moment. It would be a dreamless sleep tonight. _And,_ Harlock thought, knowing what she was thinking, _a fast one. If he could just get enough of this wine into him…_

Bottle emptied, he slid the jacket from his shoulders and dropped it carelessly to the floor. The weapons belt followed suit, and the shirt that was ruined and brittle with blood. He knew she was still watching him, the cool eyes following his undressing, and maybe sometimes he liked to let her watch, knowing what inevitably came next. He'd come to appreciate the Nibelung version of foreplay – the unblinking gaze, the slow and languorous penetration of his mind, the union of soul that his body was completely helpless to resist. After all these years Miimé could play him like a harp, her delicate pale fingers adept at plucking the hot, hard strings of him into life.

But not now. Not when he felt like fresh shit peeled from the bottom of a boot. 'Miimé,' he said. 'Engage the dark matter drive. Inskip us the hell out of this space.'

'Destination?' she asked, with her back resting against the timber.

'Anywhere.' He reached for a new bottle and cast his gaze around for a corkscrew as he cursed the ancient inventors of cork. 'Somewhere where there's grass,' he told her. 'I don't care what colour.'

Tochiro fluttered along the edges of his consciousness. _((you're not pursuing, then))_

'What for,' Harlock replied, sliding a drawer open and sweeping his fingers through the contents.

 _((i thought you wanted this… dealt with))_

'Yeah. Well. Now I want it to go away.' Harlock slammed the drawer shut.

 _((you can't keep running))_ Tochiro brushed a cool electronic sigh across the surface of Harlock's brain. _((you need to deal with it))_

Harlock made another useless survey of the surface of the desk. 'She stabbed me.'

 _((and yet still not the worst thing a woman has ever done to you))_

Harlock's glare was wasted in the dim coolness of the room.

 _((she has a deathshadow))_ Tochiro reminded.

'So have I.'

 _((yes. but is she afraid to use hers))_

Harlock's lip twitched. 'Miimé,' he said, because she was still there, watching him from the safety of the doorway, and she knew where the corkscrew was and wasn't telling. 'Take us out.' He didn't wait to see her go. Returned the bottle back unopened to the desk and took his thwarted thirst wearily to the bathroom.

 _Another scar,_ he thought as he stood before the mirror, picking soberly at the blood that scabbed around the fresh-knit wound.

 _((small, compared to the rest))_

'But deep,' he replied, abandoning the task as pointless and sliding his pants from his hips.

 _((does she hate you that much))_

Harlock's gaze clouded over at the memory of Ekaterina's venomous lunge for his throat. 'More,' he replied, remembering the deeper wounds Ekaterina had ripped into him with her words.

 _((you never listen))_

Harlock ran the water in the shower and tested it with his outstretched hand.

 _((you never want to))_

'I don't want to now.' Harlock tugged off his eye-patch and stepped beneath the stream of running water. 'I'm tired, Tochiro…'he sighed as the blood sloughed from his body and swirled crimson and dark in the water at his feet. He watched it spiral down the drain, felt Tochiro slide from his brain and leave him suddenly empty. Another hole he had to fill.

Harlock raised his face to the rushing stream. Tilted his head back to let the shower sluice like needles into him – the dead, empty smell of recirculated water, and the dead, empty taste of it as it ran into his mouth. He thought of a day of cold driving rain. The dark sweet smell of it as it sank into peaty earth. The trees bending with the weight of it. The sound of it as it rode in waves across the land. Harlock had tasted a hundred rains on a hundred planets, but nowhere had he found the cool, sweet rain of Earth. He wanted to go home.

* * *

It was dark on the bridge, and quiet, and Aristotle's boots made muted scuffing sounds on the pressed metal of the stairs as he tread lightly towards the upper command. Light glowed green ahead of him, cast flickering shadows in the cavernous wastes of the ceiling and sent his own shadow dancing from the heels of his boots.

'You alone here, darlin'?' he asked as he crested the landing, and Miimé turned from the dark matter drive to acknowledge him with the obliqueness of her all-knowing smile. 'It's late,' she said, as though that would explain everything.

'It is,' he agreed, his eyes on the curving arc of the drive as it turned according to the Nibelung's unknown whims. 'It's late and I'm hungry. Maji is arse-deep in metal shavings and Yattaran is playing hard to get and I was looking for a dinner date and I was wondering if maybe the bird was free… you haven't seen him, have you? Assuming he's a him, that is.'

She didn't turn again to look at him, but he imagined she was still smiling.

'We think he's a he,' she said, 'but not even Captain is brave enough to find out.'

Aristotle laughed at that, wondering if Miimé knew she was funny. Or if they even had 'funny' on whatever planet she came from. He hovered at a safe distance, away from the questing tendrils of dark matter that leaked from the generator, and well out of the reach of the fireflies of light that drifted sporadically from her hair.

'Where we headed?' he asked, since she wasn't taking the bait and he was, apparently, going to be eating alone.

She looked at him from the corner of her eye and returned her attention to the orb beneath her fingertips. 'Captain wants grass.'

'Grass, huh.' Aristotle slid his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. 'Grass,' he said again, as though she couldn't have said anything less likely for a man to hear on the bridge of the biggest baddest battleship in this or any sector. 'Um… any particular kind?'

'Captain prefers it green.'

Aristotle rocked forward onto his toes and then back again on his heels. 'Any ideas where we might find this preferably green grass?'

'The ship's computer has made a suggestion.'

'Ship's computer, hey. I suppose you asked it.'

'I didn't need to.'

'No. I s'pose not. I don't ask it things either, and it still does what I didn't ask.'

That made Miimé laugh, and Aristotle decided he liked the high, lilting sweetness of that laugh. He took a step closer to the questing tendrils of dark matter.

'How does that thing work,' he asked, his eyes on the orb that swirled beneath her fingertips. It looked alive to him, responsive to her fingers, solid and yet intangible all at the same time. He fancied he saw clouds on the swirling surface, and landscapes revealed in glimpses beneath them, as though a tiny planet hovered beneath the shifting palms of her hands.

'The dark matter drive uses my consciousness,' she said, 'to move Arcadia from one point to another.'

'I see,' he replied, not even remotely comprehending what she meant, distracted as he was by the movements of her hands and the shifting of her ass behind the shimmering curtain of her hair. 'Only… how can the drive define a fixed point in space using your mind?'

'Nothing is fixed in space, Aristotle, because there is no space. And there is no time. There is only consciousness.' She looked at him, to see if he understood. 'You, and me, everything around us, Arcadia… even the dark matter drive is born from consciousness.'

He looked back at her, knowing she was sharing something profound yet feeling dumber than he ever had in his whole life. 'You telling me the entire universe exists inside your head?'

She raised a hand in answer and created a tiny galaxy made of light – stars and nebulae made of the same stuff as she was. 'Anywhere I want to go, I can find it here.' She lowered her hand and they watched as the stars dissolved away into nothing. 'Existence is an illusion, and the universe around us is merely a fragment of the reality we experience when we dream. We exist in our dreams with the same certainty as we exist in what you call Time and Space – we see, we feel, we love… In our dreams we become unstuck, drifting free of Time and Space.'

'So all of this,' he said, taking his hand from his pocket and waving it expansively around the bridge, 'including me, and everything I see and feel, is just a dream inside your head?'

'Inside _our_ heads, Aristotle – we are all leaves on the same tree.' She turned to face him properly, the scent of him wafting faintly on the air. He smelt good, and clean. He always did. 'Humans dream even more than Nibelung, but they can't control it. They're so clumsy, always falling into the cracks between realities.' She sighed, gently, and shook loose the long waves of her hair. 'I can't explain it,' she said, truthfully. 'Not in your words.'

'Then tell me in your words,' he said, moving closer, risking the sting of the dark matter as it drifted from her body. Words flowed like water from her mouth, crystal sounds that were ancient and beautiful and mesmerising. He closed his eyes to listen, fancied he saw galaxies birthing and dying in the dark space behind his eyes.

'So that's how,' he said, foolishly, when the words had died into silence and his eyes were opened and fixed again on her own. 'Could I do it?'

'Would you like to try?' she asked him slyly, moving aside to let him join her at the orb.

'I don't know…' he replied, not trusting her. Not completely, anyway. He eyed the dark matter drive warily, far from willing to put his tender pink hide in the reach of all those stinging tendrils.

'I'll show you,' she said, reaching for his hand. He let her take it. Let her place it over the swirling orb of moving light.

There was a bang and a flash, and Aristotle wasn't quite sure if all the noise and fireworks were going on inside his head or outside of it. All he knew was that he was flat on his back and that his hand was burning so hard there should have been smoke drifting from his fingertips. Somewhere he could hear laughter, a high and bell-like tinkle, and Miimé leaned down to hover, smiling, in his field of view.

'I'm sorry,' she said, still laughing, because apparently the sight of him flying through the air was funny. Who knew?

'No you're not.' Aristotle grinned up at her, closed his eyes and surrendered to stupidity – not to mention the distinct possibility that his pants were wet.

And was it wrong of him to be so turned on?

* * *

Feydar Zone adjusted his glasses on his nose, grateful for their tint, the purple-haze safety of the lenses that protected him from the cruel and disapproving light of the world. Not that Deathshadow's bridge was lit with the fluoroscopic glare of a standard-issue Coalition ship – Zone had made adjustments to Deathshadow 3's systems as soon as he'd come aboard. From the level of the lighting to the temperature of the air, nothing had escaped his megalomaniacal brand of control as he had slowly and methodically automated every operational system from bow to stern. Only the Nibelung construct of the dark matter drive remained beyond his understanding. And his control – for that he needed the dark matter in Ekaterina Komarov's blood, imperfect as the compromise was. And Zone hated imperfection and compromise. Even more than he hated Ekaterina Komarov.

He sat down at the console he had appropriated as his own and scrolled back through images of Arcadia from his remote surveillance at Neo Triton. Harlock's ship no longer bore any resemblance to Deathshadow 4 – well, except for the warp core signature and the beacon that still broadcast her Coalition ident code, and the dark matter that bled from her in vast, detectable waves.

Zone leaned his elbows on the console and pushed his fingers into the dark waves of his hair, squeezing tight on his skull as if to spark his brain into action. How had Harlock done it? This kind of redesign must have taken years. Thousands of man-hours. Thousands of men. Engineers of a skill that Zone could only dream about.

His eyes traced Arcadia's outlines through the tint of his glasses, lingered on the skull that crowned her prow, traced the spine that stretched along her back beneath the faintly scaly skin. _No,_ he realised with belated clarity. _She hadn't been re-engineered._ Arcadia was organic, of that there was no doubt. A living construct that fairly pulsed with a dark life of its own. _But how…?_ The fingers squeezed harder into his skull. Self-inflicted pain that made him close his eyes and suck in a small breath. _Nibelung technology?_ Perhaps Harlock had found the lost race. Perhaps they had found him. Whatever Harlock's secret, Zone had to have it. Would risk everything for the power it could offer him…

He stiffened, his ears pricking at the faint scuff of a boot on the deck behind him, skin tingling as the air parted around him in a gentle eddy. _Stupid bitch,_ he thought, whirling abruptly from his chair.

'Always with the knives…' Zone slammed the blade out of Ekaterina's hand and sent it clattering to the floor, shoved her back against the bulkhead and pressed his groin against her. 'On what planet does this count as foreplay?'

Ekaterina grinned as she felt him harden against her stomach. 'I can name at least eight,' she said, pushing him roughly away.

Zone smiled tightly at her, removed his glasses and coat and laid them leisurely across the console he'd been working at. 'No doubt you've fucked your way through all eight of them.' He carefully kicked the knife out of her reach. 'God knows you've had plenty of time to do it.'

'Bastard,' she spat, launching at him, unsurprised when he plucked her fist out of the air and spun her on her toes, twisted her arm behind her back and shoved her face-first against the wall.

'Don't stop,' he murmured, reaching around to cup a breast in one hand. 'You know it turns me on.'

'I hate you,' she said as he spun her back around to face him.

'I hate you too.' He unzipped her flight suit and slid it aggressively from her shoulders, inspected the raw skin on her chest, pink and soft and knit well over the blaster wounds. 'It's ugly,' he said, his hands latching roughly onto her exposed breasts.

She leaned her head back and exposed her throat to his mouth. 'I _will_ kill you one day.'

'No. You won't.' Zone brushed his lips across the offered flesh. 'Without me, you can't destroy Harlock.'

'Without me,' she said as his teeth grazed her skin, 'your plan to rebuild the Deathshadow Fleet will fail.'

'So for now,' he kissed her hard on the mouth, his fingers still clutched tight around her breasts, 'we need each other alive.'

'And when I no longer need you,' she said, breaking free of the kiss, 'I'll kill you.'

He grinned. Kissed her again. Held back a groan as her hand snaked its way beneath his belt.

'What did Harlock taste like?' he asked against her lips, and he felt her smile beneath his teeth.

'History.'


	5. part 5

**The Wheel**

* * *

 **part five**

* * *

Aristotle Jones paid for it only when he needed to – and he rarely needed to. The sunbright of his hair attracted women like moths to a flame, the antagonistic glare in his hard blue eyes repelling just as many as were lured in by the charisma that seeped from the pores of his skin. But for those that responded to the challenge in his eyes, all the heavenly delights that Aristotle possessed lay open to them. Not for him the wilting wallflower – he preferred the adventurous and the uninhibited. Aristotle liked to lie back and let his women take charge.

Tochiro looked out of Aristotle's eyes from where he sat propped against the head of the bed, his hands tied above his head and his legs let loose on the covers as the women removed their clothing with slow and tantalising grace. Two of them, Tochiro observed with interest, one slim and golden-skinned with her breasts barely hidden beneath the delicate sweep of her hair – liquid brown hair with all the translucency of burnt molasses. A forest of equally translucent curls beckoned at the juncture of her thighs, but Tochiro's gaze was drawn by the other girl, blue where the first was gold, breasts with nipples the indigo colour of midnight, and stiff yellow hair that hung down to skim across straight-muscled shoulders. Tochiro knew her hair was stiff because Aristotle had had his fingers in it, just before they'd stripped him naked and tied him to the bed. Tochiro sighed in anticipation – or was it jealousy? – felt the sigh come out of Aristotle's mouth as he searched the gunner's mind for the girls' names, but nothing was there. Nothing had ever been there.

Aristotle tested his bonds, the knots flimsy and amateurish and tied with great haste. The girls didn't want him incapacitated, they only wanted him still. Wanted to enjoy the pleasure of holding him captive, to see that hard-muscled body squirming and writhing in delight. Aristotle grinned wolfishly, and Tochiro felt his lips pull back from unfamiliar teeth in the smile. He felt other things too – the soft cloth that bound Aristotle's wrists, the cool air that drifted down from the fan in the ceiling, the hot stirring of blood in Aristotle's loins as he strained theatrically against his restraints. Aristotle was getting impatient – he wanted to feel blue and gold hands caressing the hard lines of his body. Wanted to run his tongue around the indigo buds of the blue girl's breasts. Wanted to bury his face in the curls between the golden girl's thighs...

Tochiro's electronic toes fairly curled in anticipation. Aristotle's dreams weren't like Harlock's – Harlock's inner world was dark and cold and tinged with the hard-edged clarity of the eternally disillusioned. Aristotle's world glowed with the rosy flush of nostalgia, the edges expanded beyond all proportion by the gunner's swollen ego. In Aristotle's dreams, _every_ thing was larger than life.

Honey-gold hands slid along the length of Aristotle's thighs, firm long fingers tracing the musculature as he squirmed and strained in the sheets of the bed. He groaned as golden fingers teased through the hair that dusted light across his groin, and Tochiro supposed that Aristotle was as exotic to these women as they were to him, with his yellow hair and his pale skin and the tight, coiled-spring hardness of his body. Blue hands settled on his shoulders and Aristotle looked up into a face the colour of cool water, fresh painted lips that parted to meet his own, his mouth opening hungrily to receive a dark and questing tongue.

Tochiro sighed again and felt Aristotle's mind turn in his sleep. He wished he'd been more like Aristotle in life. Wished the women had come running after him instead of the other way around. Then maybe he too could dream dreams of being tied to a bed with an alien tongue buried deep in his mouth.

Tochiro was annoyed suddenly, at all the opportunities missed in life and lost now forever to the shifting mists of time. He pulled out of Aristotle's mind and shattered himself into fragments, his consciousness exploding into shards of electric self-awareness that darted unseen through Arcadia, as unnoticed to her passengers as breathing, as silent as the blood pumping warm beneath their human skin. But inexorably, and always, like a moth drawn to the deadly light of a flame, Tochiro found himself gravitating back towards the people that glowed luminous in Arcadia's false electronic night: Maji, glancing at his watch as he hunched over a panel of exposed wiring. Aristotle, asleep face-down on his bed and drooling into his pillow. Yattaran, a starfish snoring on his back, his lips hanging slack as the air puffed over them in sharp and jerky bursts. All of them, all of these frail, mortal humans, tempting him with the myriad sins of the flesh that Tochiro couldn't quite, could never quite, was desperately unwilling to accept could never be his again. After all, wasn't that why he and Harlock had stolen the oscillators out from under the Sanction's arrogant and high-bridged noses? Resetting the universe was never only about restarting Time…

The bird squawked at the periphery of his sensors, a forlorn and dismal sound that drew all the disparate parts of Tochiro back into himself until he was a single locus of consciousness, an unblinking eye that turned on all axes and saw all things and moved now to the bridge, to the bird, preening as it perched awkwardly on the back of the captain's chair.

 _((hello))_ Tochiro said as he touched upon the bird's consciousness, and maybe the bird felt the touch because it paused in its preening, shook its wings as though it knew how to use them, tilted its head back and cawed – a long dissonant sound that anybody else might have interpreted as melancholy, but to Tochiro signalled nothing more than hunger. Tochiro chuckled to himself as recollections of stolen food and ruined dinners filtered to the surface of his memory, along with how many times Harlock had wanted to strangle the clumsy thing, and all the times they had tied a bandanna around its beak in a desperate attempt to halt its unremittent thieving. _((stupid bird)),_ Tochiro whispered affectionately as the bird dipped its beak back towards the ink-black of its feathers.

The bridge chronometer blinked orange and clicked itself over to 00:00, old Earth time. Not that time meant anything when you were dead – in the way that men measured death, that is, with no room for all the states in-between. _Although some dead men could not quite bring themselves to stay dead,_ Tochiro thought, his attention turning to Harlock as his friend entered the bridge, tendrils of blue drifting from his body as he passed through the corona of the dark matter generator. The bird snapped its beak towards the ceiling as Harlock lowered himself into the captain's chair.

 _((captain on the bridge)),_ Tochiro announced in long-forgotten protocol, hoping Harlock would hear the facetiousness in his intent. Communication was difficult when you didn't have a face to back it up.

Harlock slumped silent into shadow, rested an elbow on the arm of his chair and leaned his cheek in lazy dejection on his upraised hand. He might have been dozing except for the unblinking gaze of his eye as it stared out at the billowing clouds of inskip.

'Captain of nothing,'he replied at length, oblivious to the dry rustling of the bird at his back.

 _((be like that, then))_

The bridge chronometer blinked again and clicked itself over to 00:03. But time meant nothing, not when you were dead.

* * *

Ekaterina Komarov stared down at Feydar Zone as he slept, her lips compressing with contempt as she hefted the cool steel of the knife in her hands. It would be an easy matter to kill him, to slide the blade deep into his unsuspecting flesh. But then, if she did… She shook herself, blinked her eyes to get the red-haze vision of blood out of them, sheathed the knife and stretched herself carefully alongside Zone on his bed. He didn't stir as she inched herself closer and placed a weightless finger upon his tightly closed lips, the air sighing gently from his nostrils in slow and careful breaths. Mr Zone didn't snore. Not even in sleep did he loosen the control that defined him, his eyes moving behind his eyelids as he dreamed his strictly nameless dreams.

Ekaterina wondered what a man like Zone would dream about, and she hoped those dreams were dreadful. Hers were, her nightmares magnified and made real by a damning other-dimensional reality. The Nibelung technology did that to you – an unpredicted side-effect of the dark matter as it seeped its way into your blood. It was probably a good thing the Deathshadow fleet had been decimated – any one of those uncontrolled dreamers might have destroyed a galaxy.

Instead of just a planet.

Zone sighed in his sleep, a momentary lapse of control, and Ekaterina removed her finger from his lips. She propped on her elbow and studied the contours of his face – he was not unattractive. Handsome, even, the nose fine and straight above a mouth that was expert at drawing unexpected pleasure from her hot and angry body. Just staring at that mouth made Ekaterina want to taste it, and she bit down on her lip until her teeth pierced to the blood – because if she could replace the desire with pain then she could make it all go away. If there was anything the years had taught Ekaterina Komarov, it was that pain made everything go away. It was the universal constant – you could always count on pain.

She took hold of the sheet that covered Zone and dragged it carefully down his naked body, slowly by degrees exposing the lithe, lean lines of him to the carefully modulated temperature of the air. Again, not unattractive, and she smiled to herself as his skin rose in goosebumps in the draft from the open door. In a moment he would open his eyes, and –

'What are you doing?' His hand grasped her wrist at the same speed as his eyes snapped open, the irises dark and impenetrable even without the purple-tinted shield of his glasses.

'Looking,' she smirked, her wrist cracking audibly beneath the tightening grip of his fingers.

Zone scowled at her, his pleasant lips turning downward in irritation. His tongue clicked with annoyance as he expelled her wrist from his grip and reached down to draw the sheet back up to his chest. 'Get out.'

She glared at him, the blood rising in her eyes so that all the world was red. _It would be an easy matter to kill him,_ she thought again, her mind circling in haphazard spirals the way it always did, back and back and back to its endless dreams of easy death. _She would slide her hands around his neck and press her thumbs into his yielding throat…_

She leaned abruptly in and kissed him, hot and hard and lingering on the mouth.

'Your mouth is bleeding,' he said, pushing her off and wiping distastefully at the blood she had left on his lips. 'Get out. You make me sick.'

* * *

Planet Sasori had well earned its name 'Scorpion,' since the sting in its tail had struck doubly hard at the settlers that attempted to eke their living from its hard-packed soil.

In the ninety years since the Homecoming War, when the Sanction had employed the barrels of guns to turn the human race away from its collective return to Earth, the handful of expatriates that settled for Sasori had barely made a dent across the planet's immutable surface, and two generations of accumulated failure had led to dissatisfaction and disillusion and an overwhelming desire to migrate again – if not back to Earth, then to anywhere, and at any price, and even if they had to sell their blood to get there.

Gerald Montgomery, executive officer of Hato Corporation's antiquated long-haul cargo runner Hektor – and fifty-two years old today, though he hadn't yet found the gift his wife had tucked amongst the underwear in his duffel – acknowledged the receipt of comms at his console and turned with practised ease to his captain. 'Loading complete. All passengers accounted for.'

Captain Daley nodded in equally well-practiced acknowledgment. 'Prepare to depart orbit.' The captain appeared oblivious to his XO's special day – though he was in fact only waiting for the end of shift, when he could quietly hand Montgomery the bottle of Vanderhaven he had sequestered away in the bottom drawer of his desk.

'Aye, sir.' Montgomery returned his attention to his console, alerting all sections in preparation for the breaking of orbit. Ferrying passengers wasn't what Montgomery would have called the most exciting job in the quadrant, but he appreciated the quiet predictability it afforded. And, since his retirement from the SDF, Montgomery had come to enjoy predictability. It had taken a lot of time to get the testosterone out of his system, but he had to admit that these days he really appreciated not being shot at. 'Section heads report all ready,' he announced.

'Take us out.' Daley extended a lazy hand to accept the datapad his ensign had handed him. The captain didn't need to micromanage Hektor's departure. Or her crew – they were all competent men and women. Besides which, this was a simple run that they'd made a dozen times before – and would keep on making until Sasori was as empty as it had been before the Homecoming War. Daley looked up from his reports to take in the globe of the planet as it receded in the rear monitor. Even from this vantage it didn't look welcoming. Hell, it wasn't even pretty, and he wondered briefly what drove the first settlers to put down roots there. Desperation, he supposed – being turned away from your home planet by your own government must have broken a lot of hope-filled souls.

'Captain?'

Daley glanced up at Hektor's most recent bridge posting. A serious piece of beefcake – to recycle his daughter's teenage terminology – if ever he saw one, stuffed into a too-tight uniform and with his shoulder-length hair tied severely back in the requisite knot. Hato Corp wasn't a military outfit so Daley couldn't enforce haircuts on the crew, but he could enforce hairstyles. And he did.

'Yes, Lieutenant Rivera, what seems to be the problem?'

Rivera's impassive expression betrayed none of the good-natured amiability he was supposedly renowned for. In Daley's eyes he looked like an intimidating slab of beef in bad need of a haircut, despite the glowing recommendations from HQ. Rivera cleared his throat and said, 'passenger quarters are reporting an increase in ambient temperature.'

Daley sighed. No matter what shithole you rescued them from, the passengers were always so annoyingly persnickety. 'This isn't a cruise ship,' he muttered by rote, the exasperation in his tone making both his XO and first mate snort at the well-worn phraseology. 'They've been aboard, what – ' Daley glanced up at the ship's chronometer, ' – not thirty minutes, and already they're complaining. I can hardly wait for the first meal service.'

Daley sighed again and scraped his fingernails loudly through the close-cut stubble of his hair. He liked doing that. He liked watching people cringe when he did. 'Very well.' He nodded at Rivera. 'You go down.' It was always preferable to send an officer to hear the complaints and Rivera had to earn his lumps sometime. Plus it could work both ways – either the beefcake's bulging muscles would intimidate the passengers into shutting up for the duration, or his supposedly good-natured personality would have them eating out of his meaty hands.

'Aye, sir.' Rivera wasted no time transferring his console to the nearest officer and departing the bridge – another auspicious sign for Hektor's captain. The man was good at taking orders. And most especially, he didn't talk back.

'Poor bastard.' Montgomery grinned large under his ginger moustache and the captain let the profanity slide. After all, it was the XO's birthday.

* * *

He had asked for grass, and Tochiro and Miimé had certainly delivered. Harlock strode his way through swards of it, thigh-high and rustling and vaguely green under a yellow sky, though the veins of it showed turquoise in the low morning sun. His fingers trailed through it as he walked, catching randomly on rough blades and grasping unseeing at seed heads just to feel them powdering apart beneath his fingertips.

He walked deeper into the waving sea of grass, the atmosphere heavier than Earth-normal and weighing him down hard, and it showed in the sweat that pricked across his brow as he laboured up a rise and turned to survey the circle of the world around him. A shallow valley, some low rounded hills, and beyond that, in the direction he was headed, a wooded copse that held the promise of shade and sweet water. He breathed deep of the pale air, his gaze drifting towards the valley where Arcadia rested, the grotesque and bastard offspring of a Nibelung and a Human after the dark matter had consumed them whole and spat them all back out again. He could see figures moving along the top deck – Maji, and the unmistakeable bulk of Yattaran as they took advantage of a rare chance to inspect the hull in atmosphere. What Harlock lacked in depth-perception was more than compensated for by the better than 20-20 vision that graced his remaining eye – the cruel irony of a process that had rendered him more than human and had heightened all his senses, all while leaving him half-blinded at the same time.

His good eye narrowed as Arcadia's newest recruit emerged onto the deck with Miimé close behind him. Miimé rarely ventured into atmosphere, and Harlock wondered what persuasions Aristotle had used to get her out into the watery morning sun. He wasn't jealous of the rookie, he reminded himself forcefully, glad that from this distance Tochiro wasn't able siphon that particularly unwelcome foible from out of his head. Miimé was her own woman, and free, and they owed each other nothing… except for a near-century of mutual self-loathing. Which, if Harlock was really honest with himself, was the closest he had ever been to love.

* * *

Yattaran commenced a circuit of turret number three, treading carefully across the mounting track as Maji followed, the engineer stooping for the nineteenth time to run his hand along the skin of Arcadia's hull.

'What the hell's so fascinating?' Yattaran called back to Maji over his shoulder, the sun hazing across the smudges on his glasses as he peered towards the summit of the turret. What little of the cannon barrels he could see were at least four times around as he himself was. Maybe five – he'd have to climb inside one to find out.

'The question,' the engineer replied as he rose to his feet and tucked the tail of his jersey back beneath the belt of his workpants, 'is what is _not_ so fascinating. I mean, how did Captain build this thing? And from _what?'_ Maji waved his hand back in the direction they had come, towards the vertebrae that rose in black anatomical correctness from the midpoint of Arcadia's top deck to end at the skull that graced her prow. 'And why does she look like _this?'_

It wasn't as though Maji didn't know what Arcadia looked like – he'd crawled suited across her hull more than once in the time he'd been aboard. But crawling across her with his hands encased in gloves and the glazing of a helmet cutting off the full scope of his vision, was an entirely different beast to standing on her, now, with all his senses open and exposed to her unadulterated majesty. _'Majesty'_ was the right word, he thought admiringly as the great arching spine of her curved for almost half a kilometre ahead of him, the complicated skeletal structure illuminated by a sun that shone obliquely down from a clear and vapid sky. Majestic. And awe-inspiring. And also vaguely disturbing.

Maji knelt again, his shirt slipping free from where he had so recently tucked it in. 'And have you felt it?' He ran his hand along the dark metal, pressed the pads of his fingers into it, felt it yielding almost imperceptibly at his touch. This was what disturbed Maji most. Not the mountainous vertebra of Arcadia's spine. And not the death's-head that grinned its macabre challenge at the universe. It was Arcadia's hull – the vaguely yielding and otherworldly skin of her.

'It's Nibelung,' Yattaran supplied somewhat redundantly as he trundled around from the opposite side of the turret. 'Might as well be magic.'

The engineer stood, knees cracking, and set about tucking his shirt in again. 'You saying you don't understand it?'

'No. I'm saying I _can't.'_ Yattaran used his sleeve to wipe at the sweat on his face. The sun was higher in the sky now and Yattaran was covered in too many layers of clothing to deal with direct solar energy. And far too many layers of flab.

' _She_ could tell you,' Maji said, nodding to where Miimé was disappearing back down the open hatch under Aristotle's watchful eyes.

'Yeah. Maybe. But she doesn't talk to me. Can't get two words out of her.'

'Have you even tried?'

Yattaran wiped again at his face. Truth be told he hadn't really tried, not properly, the cool, otherworldly beauty of the Nibelung stunning him unfailingly into silence if she so much as looked sideways in his direction. And if she chanced to look directly at him… Yattaran flushed inside his skivvies as his autonomous nervous system overrode all his carefully planted failsafes. Women. They were _all_ alien as far as he was concerned – and Miimé doubly so.

'You'll get over it,' Maji laughed at Yattaran's blushing face, 'once your hormones settle down.'

'Smart-arse,' Yattaran grumped good-naturedly, his cheeks burning despite all his efforts to make the blush go away. _'He_ doesn't seem to have any problems,' he snarked, indicating Aristotle with a contemptuous jerk of his head.

Having seen Miimé back into the ship, Aristotle had peeled his sweater off over his head and balled it neatly into a pillow and was busy stretching his half-naked body out on the deck. He grinned at his audience and raised a hand in jovial salutation. 'Try not to let my magnificence distract you from your work,' he called out ostentatiously as he settled back to catch some unadulterated rays, laughing to himself as Yattaran's explosive response was carried back to him on the breeze.

* * *

The sound of Feydar Zone eating was driving Ekaterina Komarov mad.

Zone was camped at his station as usual, working while he ate, the irregular clank of fork against plate grating through Ekaterina's concentration as her fingers negotiated the intricacies of the dark matter drive. There was another clunk of cutlery hitting crockery, and Ekaterina's hands tore from the control orb in disgust. The ship shuddered slightly at the unexpected withdrawal, but if Zone noticed the rippling of the ship around him there was no outward sign of it as a forkful of food disappeared distractedly into his mouth.

Ekaterina narrowed her eyes as Zone carefully navigated his plate, hating how he arranged his food into carefully selected groupings, as anal about his diet as he was about everything else. Zone approached gastronomy like a robot, as uncaring of flavour as one of those programmable food synthesizers that were installed on all the bigger ships these days. Ekaterina studied him critically and wondered how a man so adept with his mouth could fail to enjoy one of the greatest pleasures that lip and tongue could provide. For Zone, food was neither good nor bad – it was only energy.

Zone's fork clanked against his plate and Ekaterina turned on him with all the viciousness of a dog.

'Can't you take that to the galley where it belongs?'

Zone didn't bother to look up from his lunch, forking straight-faced through something pale and gelatinous with another loud and grating scrape.

'Sitting around eating isn't getting us any closer to Harlock,' she snapped. 'We had him right in the palms of our hands – ' She bit off her vitriol, because she was the one who had Harlock in her hands, and she was the one who had let him get away.

Zone's dark eyes lifted coolly to look at her. 'Harlock isn't really our goal, now, is he.'

'You know what I mean,' she said.

'I know what you mean.' Zone slid another forkful into his mouth, his gaze still fixed tightly on her own. 'Do you?'

She smiled at him, or tried to smile, her lips twitching stiffly in the seconds before she abandoned the idea altogether. 'How,' she asked, looking away from the ice-cold challenge in his eyes, 'do you plan to find Arcadia? They could be anywhere by now.'

Zone turned back to his plate and scraped the last of his meal up with his fork. 'Now that Harlock knows there's another Deathshadow on his game board, it will be a simple matter for us to turn him in our direction.' He raised the fork to his mouth and slid the food from its tines with his teeth. 'Where are we?'

She shrugged. Deathshadow 3 was in inskip, and Ekaterina didn't have the space-time awareness of a Nibelung. The old ones steered according to the four-dimensional universe inside their heads, while Ekaterina could only steer with her human brain, its spongy three dimensions sealed tight inside her skull. The dark matter interface had never been built with a human brain in mind – turned out the Nibelung hadn't been quite as reciprocal with their technology as the Sanction had believed when they brokered that ill-fated alliance.

'I don't know,' she said. She hadn't been paying attention when she pulled her consciousness free of the interface. And that was Zone's fault. _Everything_ was Zone's fault.

Zone refrained visibly from sighing, leaned back in his seat and raised an antibacterial napkin to his lips. He kept stores of the things, stockpiled in random places around the ship – heaven forbid he not be able to wipe the sticky residue of life from his fingertips.

'Take us out of inskip,' he said, screwing the napkin into a ball and dropping it onto his empty plate. 'If you can manage it without crashing into anything this time.'

Ekaterina rankled at the slur on her control of the dark matter drive. Despite the challenges her competence was improving – even Zone would have to admit it.

'And then what,' she asked, imagining all the ways she was going to make him admit it.

'Find me something to aim at.' He dumped his plate onto a nearby console and returned his attention to his board. 'I want to test the upgrades to the AI targeting system.'

* * *

'Sir.' William Henderson – career officer at the ripe old age of 25, having lied bold-faced on his application and joining Hato Corp before the minimum age – looked up from his board and squinted out of the forward port, slightly left of centre and down, if such notions were relevant in the omnidirectional void of space. 'Sensors are registering an anomaly at ninety-seven-point-two mark.'

Daley glanced up from the datapad his stores officer took every opportunity to shove under his nose. 'What kind of anomaly, Henderson?'

There followed thirty seconds of silence as Henderson stared back down at his console before finally conceding, 'I… uh, unknown. Sir.' Career officer or not, space was always throwing something new at you, and Henderson was still too young to have seen everything yet.

'Oh, fer crying out loud.' Gerald Montgomery, the worse for wear after having consumed nearly a third of the bottle of Vanderhaven the captain had slipped to him the night before, rubbed a hand wearily over his face. Hektor might once have been Hato Corp's pride and joy, but the old girl was getting on in years. Eight hours in and they'd had to drop out of warp while the engineers adjusted the heat sink – turned out the passengers weren't just whistling Dixie when they said it was getting hot down there.

Montgomery leaned back in his chair and followed Henderson's gaze out of the viewport, hoping against hope that nothing would register on the retinas of his bloodshot eyes – floating dark in the middle of nowhere wasn't nearly enough to rattle the old-timer, but anomalies definitely were. Whatever Henderson's anomaly turned out to be, they'd have to investigate, file a report, prepare a profitability statement in case it turned out to be salvage or something else old man Hato's money-grubbing offspring could financially exploit, lodge a buoy to stake the claim and ah... 'Shit,' he grumbled, closing his eyes for a moment of brief respite from the overhead lights.

'What do you mean, unknown?' First mate Wu had left his station and was now leaning proprietorially over Henderson's shoulder – Henderson's post had been Wu's before his promotion, and the first mate was having trouble letting go. Wu nudged Henderson's hands from the board and toggled through the readout parameters, finally settling on one that made him stand up straight and whistle through his teeth.

'Captain. Sensors are registering dark matter.'

That made Daley sit up in his chair, his back as stiff as the bristles on his shaven head. 'What do you mean 'dark matter?' How? Can you give me a visual?'

Wu fiddled some more with the board, directing and magnifying the external camera array until a billowing black cloud shot with red lightning zoomed into sudden focus on the main screen.

'That's it,' Wu said as he stepped away from Henderson's board. 'Whatever it is.'

* * *

Harlock stared down at the rippling pool of water, all his senses on alert for any disturbance of the surface, or for any sign of movement in the quiet glade beyond. He didn't want a repeat of the nasty surprise he'd had on Vagus – he still had the scars on his arm, and immortality was no prophylactic against the physical effects of venom. He'd never vomited for so long or so hard in his life.

Diamonds of light sparked from the water's shifting surface and made him blink, the breeze cool as it drifted sporadically through his hair. Nothing moved in the silent pond. Nothing broke the placid calm of its surface. Nothing rustled in the reeds that lined its edges, and only the wind made any sound as it whispered through the green-blue leaves of the trees. Yattaran had been meticulously efficient when he'd scanned the terrain and announced it clear – not even the chirp of an insect broke the silence beneath the faded yellow of the sky. All this verdure, and it was inhabited only by plants.

And, lest it be forgot, rocks. Arcadia's gunner-slash-geologist had taken it upon himself to deliver a charmingly detailed report on the tectonics of the area. And the geothermal potential. And then, tossing a smirk in the direction of the balefully narrowing eyes of Yattaran, had gone on to point out the probable location of mineral deposits in case the captain had wanted to take a spade with him and do a bit of therapeutic digging.

Harlock's face had betrayed no response whatever at the suggestion – despite Tochiro choosing that exact moment to slide into his skull and remonstrate sarcastically against digging as a therapy, and following up by launching into an X-rated soliloquy about the other ways he would prefer to relax instead.

Harlock snorted to himself as he unzipped his jacket and shrugged it from his shoulders. The rookie was shaking them up with his chronic foot-in-mouth disease, but it might help if he could keep his foot out of Yattaran's vicinity once in a while. The first mate didn't take well to the provocation, and it was only a matter of time before Yattaran took his frustrations out Aristotle physically. If he hadn't done so already.

* * *

'It's a cloud.'

'How can it be a cloud?'

'I don't know, but look at it.'

Daley ignored the interchange between Henderson and Wu, glanced briefly at what little of the display he could see over the top of Wu's shoulder, and then directed his attention back to the anomaly that had appeared forward of Hektor's bow. It did indeed look like a cloud – billows of black that unfolded out of nothing and just as rapidly collapsed back in on itself. A storm of perfect darkness that was both self-generating and self-destroying, mesmerising in its beauty and shot through with flashes of red and silent lightning.

'Readings,' Daley requested distractedly, spellbound by the forming and re-forming cloud. So this was what dark matter looked like… He squinted into the tempest, darker even than the space around it, what little starlight he could see swallowed wholly and entirely by that endlessly boiling blackness.

'It's generating a localised warp field,' Wu supplied. 'Minimal wave disturbance. We shouldn't feel it from here.'

'Nevertheless,' Daley said uneasily, tearing his gaze away from the hypnotic eye of the cloud to glance at the hungover Montgomery. 'Get the warp core back online. I want us out of this space.'

'Another couple of hours on the core,' Montgomery reported, turning in his seat to look directly at the captain. 'The bastards picked a hell of a time to dump us in the doldrums.'

'Language,' reminded Daley, the admonition recited on autopilot and minus the usual annoyance that accompanied it.

'Montgomery's own autopilot kicked in, and not even remotely apologetically. Besides which, he had a headache. 'Yes, sir.' He turned back to look at the viewscreen. 'All we can do is sit and watch. At least that thing seems localised – '

'Captain!'

Montogomery's head swung around at the interruption from Henderson, the movement re-routing the blood in his hungover brain and making him wince.

'Sensors are reporting a mass in the centre of the cloud,' Henderson said.

'What?' Wu leaned back over Henderson's shoulder, wiped the lieutenant's hands from the board, and a split second later displaced him entirely from the station. 'He's right,' Wu said as he slid into Henderson's seat. 'There's a mass registering in the centre of the cloud.'

'How is that possible?' came a voice from the rear of the bridge.

'I thought they said it was dark matter,' said another voice in reply.

'Nothing could live in – '

The conversation ended abruptly as Montgomery turned to glare at the junior staff. 'Enough of that,' Montgomery snapped as Wu continued reporting.

'Mass increasing.' Wu looked up at the screen to verify visually what his sensors were telling him. 'It's huge. I think it's… something…' He blinked, narrowing his eyes at the boiling black mass. 'Captain. The mass is emerging.'

All eyes fixed on the viewscreen as the anomaly erupted in an explosion of red lightning, concentric rings of smoke exploding from a central core and dissipating into wisps that burned black against the distant stars. The boiling centre of the cloud heaved, contracted, expanded, unfolded to reveal an angular dark mass, vaguely shark-like and predatory and streaming with clinging tendrils of cloud. It emerged at speed into normal space, decelerating sharply as the anomaly behind it collapsed back into the nothing from which it had been born.

Daley swallowed, the sound audible in the sudden silence that had settled on the bridge. 'Magni – ,' he said, the word curling up halfway and dying on his tongue. He swallowed again, wincing visibly at the sound it made and hoping none of the junior crew could hear it. 'Magnify the image.'

'Aye, sir,' Montgomery replied as his broad pink hands worked their way across his board and the image on the screen zoomed into vivid focus.

'What is it?' came the voice from the rear of the bridge.

'It looks like – '

'– it can't be – '

' – it's a battleship.'

* * *

Harlock kicked off his boots, the grass cool beneath his feet and damp with the residue of what must have been a recent rain. This was pleasant, being alone in his head and with nothing to think about beyond the great curving arch of the sky. He knew Tochiro was hoping he would use the time to turn his mind to more recent developments, but the truth was he had already come to a decision about that, and he knew that his friend wasn't going to like it.

Point of fact, Harlock thought as he resumed his inspection of the rippling pool of water, was that no matter what he did or didn't do, nobody liked it, and everything came back to bite him on the arse eventually anyway – apparently there was no statute of limitations on karmic timeframes. It was one of the things his mother had tried to impress upon him before she died, because his father wasn't there to do it and at some point she'd had to give up hope of him ever coming back. Harlock hadn't listened of course, because he was young and stupid and his head was in the stars, and who would have believed a story like that anyway? He didn't. Until his mother had reminded him about his father's book – the one full of unfinished chapters. All the men of his family who'd gone out adventuring and been cut short before their time... Harlock had long contemplated that maybe it was the book itself that was the curse, but he couldn't bring himself to destroy it. Because maybe, maybe, he'd be the one to write the final chapter. The last Harlock, living well beyond his time.

He slipped off the rest of his clothes and strode into the lake until his feet no longer touched bottom and his body drifted in an undefined space that possessed neither the bone-heavy drag of gravity nor the shifting weightlessness of vacuum. He drifted on his back and stared up at the green and yellow sky, and at the wisps of moisture that were condensing in the upper atmosphere and trying very hard to turn themselves into clouds.

* * *

'Captain,' Montgomery announced as he squinted at the magnified the image, the unknown ship's only markings the stylised crucifix of the Sanction and the numbers _0003_ emblazoned on the bow-end of her hull. 'She has Coalition markings.'

'Military? Don't tell me those imbeciles are experimenting with dark matter again.' Daley relaxed back in his chair – military he could deal with. 'Send a hail,' he ordered. Standard operating procedure when encountering a military vessel. The process always reminded Daley of two dogs sniffing each others' arses until one of them got bored enough to go away – and if the engineers could get Hektor's warp core back on line Daley would be happy to be the first dog to yield. But in the meantime… 'First officer, scan that vessel and see if you can get me an ident.'

The responses from his XO and first mate were lost in the background of murmurs that broke out across the bridge, but Daley was too preoccupied with his thoughts to discipline his crew. He leaned back in his chair, his lower lip pinched tight between his forefinger and thumb as he stared at the ship on the screen.

'Sir, I have a match.' All heads swivelled to look at Wu as he added, 'It's old, but it's a definite ident.' He paused then, prompting an impatient outburst from the hungover Montgomery.

'Well come on, what is it? Or do you plan to wait until Christmas to tell us?'

Wu blinked and glanced towards the XO – he didn't have a clue what Christmas was. 'It's one of the Deathshadows, sir. From the Homecoming.'

Daley let go his of lip. 'How can that be possible?' He studied the sleek craft critically, the great ship dwarfing Hektor's modest frame as it drifted on impetus towards them, ominous in its silence and its apparent aimlessness. 'They were destroyed during the War. All of them.'

'Rumour has it one survived,' piped a voice from the rear of the bridge.

'Is this the same rumour that says one was stolen,' Montgomery interjected pithily, annoyed by the admiration he could hear in the voice, 'by its renegade Captain?'

'Captain Harlock,' Henderson supplied with the kind of unease that accompanies ghost stories told in the dark of the night.

'Captain Harlock…' a junior officer echoed reverentially on the other side of the bridge, making Daley suck air through his teeth in irritation. Sailors were a superstitious lot, and it seemed there wasn't a man in the sector who hadn't heard the rumours since they'd started surfacing on the outer rim, generated on clouds of smoke and lightning and sightings of a phantom ship helmed by a phantom captain…. Except…now that he'd seen the cloud of smoke and lightning for himself, Daley might have to concede that the stories might not all be stuff and nonsense. Regardless, Daley wasn't about to let superstition run rife on his ship and he opened his mouth for a reprimand, but his XO beat him to it.

'The man's a myth,' Montgomery snapped, glaring at Henderson for bringing the name up. And also for overloading his hungover brain – he winced visibly as the blood rushed thudding to the front of his skull. 'It's been ninety years since the Homecoming War – even if the stories were true, and even if Harlock were half the traitor the legends have painted him, he'd be long dead by now.'

'Nevertheless,' said Wu, diverting attention away from the unfortunate Henderson, 'the database says that is a Deathshadow class ship, sir, and she seems to be running under a Coalition flag.'

'That isn't Captain Harlock's ship,' interjected the voice from the rear of the bridge, and both Montgomery and Daley turned to stare at the source of the intrusion.

'My cousin's seen it,' the ensign said. 'He said it has a skull on the prow, with boiling hot furnaces where the eyes should be.' The ensign blinked earnestly at the captain. 'Those eyes are the gates to Hell, my cousin said – '

'Yes,' Montgomery interrupted witheringly. 'We've all heard the stories. Hell-pits for eyes, and great big gnashing fangs too, I'll bet.'

'My cousin never mentioned fangs,' the ensign said, his face paling to a sickly shade of off-white at the thought.

'People!' Daley's glare encompassed the entire bridge – he was losing control of the situation and he wasn't liking it. 'Could I call for a little order, please! _That_ – ' he flung a frustrated finger towards the screen, ' – is not a pirate ship. It's not a ghost ship. At worst it's an outdated piece of historical junk. More likely it's an experimental – '

'Captain!'

The interjection halted Daley mid-tirade, and he turned to the viewscreen as the cannon array on the unidentified vessel turned smoothly on their mountings to target Hektor. Daley stared at the magnified barrels on the screen, bit down on the inside of his lip and glanced across to meet Montgomery's unblinking gaze.

 _So much,_ thought Montgomery as he watched the blood drain from his captain's face, _for not being shot at._

'We've been targeted,' Wu announced.

'Shit,' Daley said, his rules on profanity abruptly forgotten. 'Tell the engine room to get us moving,' he barked at Montgomery before turning back to Wu. 'Send a message to unidentified vessel. Advise we are a non-affiliated private corporation on a humanitarian – '

'…Harlock doesn't care about humanitarians…'

'…surely the man has some honour…'

'…he's a _pirate…_ '

'…a monster…'

'…you heard the captain, he isn't real…'

'…he's real alright, he's a _demon…'_

'…a traitor…'

'…murderer…'

'…you think it's true what they – '

' _Quiet!'_

Daley was standing now, glaring at his crew and silencing them with the bloodless pallor of his face. He turned back to Wu. 'Send a message,' he said slowly and deliberately, shoring himself up with the steadiness of his voice. This was the first time in his career that he'd had to face down a battery of cannon and the thought was making the spit dry in his mouth. 'Send a message,' he said again as a bead of sweat trickled down his forehead and threatened to sting him in the eye. 'Advise of our non-combative status. Request they stand their weapons down.'

'Aye sir.' Wu broadcast the message, staring blankly at the screen as the empty seconds dragged out into one cold and quiet minute. 'They're not responding,' he announced, glancing up at the captain. 'I can't even tell if they're receiving.'

Daley lowered himself back into his chair, his fingers digging unconsciously into the arm rests. His eyes darted towards Montgomery's turgidly sweating face, and back to the ship that drifted silent on the screen. It was Coalition. It was supposed to be on _their_ side. Why the hell was it targeting them?

'…why don't they respond?' somebody said.

'…the bastard's making us sweat…'

'…we can negotiate…'

'…offer him money…'

'…pirates don't negotiate…'

' _Quiet!'_ Montgomery barked again, the word drowned out by the hubbub that was rising in pitch across the bridge.

'…money talks…'

'…don't be stupid, Harlock doesn't want money…'

'…what _does_ he want…'

'… he wants souls to feed his ghost ship…'

' _Jesus Christ!'_ Montgomery bellowed, cursing the namby-pamby types that you got in the merchant corps. You wouldn't get this kind of behaviour in the SDF. 'You heard me. _Quiet!'_

* * *

Lieutenant Rivera looked down at the child wrapped grinning around his leg, all stump teeth and green snot as it giggled up at him. From where Rivera stood, towering six-point-three hard-muscled feet above the deck, he was able to stare right down into the drooling mouth, every contour of tongue and teeth and what was that thing – the epiglottis? – visible to the perfect vision of the crack marksman. Rivera reached down with a hand the size of the infant's head and attempted to gently extricate the child from its grip around his leg, noting without emotion the silvery smear of snot that had been deposited thick along his uniform.

The lieutenant sighed inwardly, none of his frustrations or irritations visible on the stoic mask of his face – a face designed perfectly for security detail. It was a failing of his, his face – narrow eyes set deep beneath heavy brows, a straight and non-committal mouth, and a lantern sweep of jaw all designed to give out the universal impression that Rivera was thick. Or dumb. Or, worst-case – at least from Rivera's point of view – slow. Rivera hated it when anybody thought he was slow. At times like that he wanted to slam an elbow into their throats – they wouldn't think he was slow then. They wouldn't even see it coming. Rivera didn't have much to smile about these days, but he always imagined he would smile at that.

The intercom on the wall chimed just as he succeeded in extricating the child from its grip on his leg, and Rivera strode the short distance to answer the call, stumbling slightly when the limpet barrelled giggling back to cradle his knee. Rivera sighed inwardly and continued, dragging the child along with him, to the intercom. He was good with all kinds of guns, was expert in eight forms of old-Earth martial arts – and three new ones – and Daley's best use for him was down on the lower decks, babysitting. It couldn't have been more insulting if the captain had posted him to KP duty during the transit. The outer edges of his lips pulled down infinitesimally into a scowl of irritation, but if anybody had been watching during that most fleeting of split-seconds, they would likely never even have noticed.

Rivera pressed his thumb against the intercom, forcing the button back into its recess and hearing a crack as the aged plastic yielded beneath his irritation.

'Carlos, it's me,' said the voice from the speaker grille.

'What is it,' said Rivera from the depths of his well-muscled chest, shaking his leg to remove the limpet and succeeding only in making it laugh and cling to him harder. Where was the brat's mother, he wondered, glancing back along the corridor.

'We've got a situation,' said the voice – Jimmy Barden, number two on the security team and sitting in Rivera's seat on the bridge.

Carlos quit shaking his leg and stared intently at the silver grille of the intercom. 'What is it,' he said again, running through the possibilities in his head. He glanced back along the corridor to the passenger quarters – all quiet. The passengers might have been revolting, but not in the sticks and flaming-torches kind of way. So what, then?

'Lock the passenger section down and get up here,' said Jimmy. 'There's a vessel closing in. Eighty clicks and primed.'

'Primed?' Rivera repeated, to be sure he hadn't misheard.

'Coalition ident,' said Jimmy, 'out of date and not responding to hails. Henderson's up here saying it's a pirate ship.'

'What?' Rivera looked down at the giggling child. Henderson was an idiot, but there was no denying that piracy was on the increase on the outer rim and the time was coming when Hato Corp would have to arm its transports instead of hiding behind the old 'humanitarian effort' shtick. Hektor had been running too soft for too long, and if this was a raid, and if they were boarded… Rivera grabbed hold of the kid's shirt and hauled him bodily from his leg. 'On my way,' he said over the sudden squealing of the limpet that dangled in his grip.

'That's not all,' said Jimmy's tinny voice, barely audible over the screaming of the kid. 'They're saying it's Captain Harlock.'

'Bullshit,' grunted Rivera. The rumours were rife out on the spiral, but sightings of a mystery ship hardly meant it was piloted by a man MIA almost a hundred years ago. The likeliest possibility was a run-of-the-mill raid, but if the ship hovering off Hektor's bow was the phantom of the outer systems, then Carlos Rivera wanted to be on the bridge to see it.

A baby began wailing as Rivera strode back towards the passenger quarters, the sound thin and protracted and harmonising discordantly with the squealing of the dangling child whose shirt was still bunched in his giant fist. 'Kid,' he said, dumping the struggling child back onto its stumpy feet, 'go back to your mother.' Rivera didn't even know if the brat could understand him. How old did kids have to be before they could talk? _'Mother,'_ he repeated sternly as he pushed the child a bit too firmly down the hall ahead of him. 'Mum. Mom. Ma!'

The brat took off screaming, all tears and snot and probably a shitty diaper, and Carlos permitted himself a restrained shudder at the thought as he followed the tiny stamping legs into the passenger section. A half-dozen tired faces glanced up at the whirlwind as it ran screaming for its mother, and then turned with curiosity towards the uniformed Rivera.

'This section is in lockdown,' Rivera announced without preamble and not meeting the staring eyes as he punched the command code into the bulkhead panel. 'Nobody is to leave until further notice.'

He stepped back through the door and punched the reciprocal code into the panel on the other side, glancing up just in time to see the blast door slam itself shut on the passengers beyond, leaving him with a snapshot of the trusting faces aimed towards him as the door sealed itself pneumatically into position.

* * *

Arcadia's ramp lowered as soon as Harlock approached – Tochiro had probably not lost sight of him for a minute.

 _((you done thinking))_ Tochiro asked the moment the captain's toes had landed on the deck.

Harlock tread softly up the long incline into the hangar, his boots tucked under one arm and his jacket bundled loose under the other. 'Yes,' he said to the voice in his head, with the metal not quite cool beneath his bare feet.

 _((and what did you decide))_

'I want a pool.'

 _((piss off))_

Harlock shrugged, the movement passing from his shoulders to the presence prowling through his brain. 'We need more men and the men will need exercise.'

 _((they have a gym))_

Harlock's lips twisted wryly. 'Yattaran doesn't seem to have found it yet.'

 _((he found it. he shut the door and walked away))_

That made Harlock smile. 'I want a pool,' he persisted, falling into the old sparring pattern – he could be as stubborn as Tochiro when he wanted to be. But not quite as relentless.

 _((recruit some women and i'll give you one))_

Harlock repressed a laugh as he tread the silent corridors. 'You saying you won't give me a pool unless I give you some women to put in it?'

 _((quid pro quo))_

Harlock sighed loudly, and not without a touch of melodrama. For all that Tochiro occupied the heart of the galaxy's most powerful supercomputer, he was still prone to the most unbelievable displays of human behaviour. And illogic. Which was apparently what happened when you melded a human psyche with Nibelung circuitry.

'And how,' he inquired of Tochiro, 'will I lure these women aboard if all my men are as fat as Yattaran?'

 _((…))_

'Well?"

 _((i'm thinking))_

* * *

Ekaterina Komarov leaned over what used to be her XO's console and wiped a gloved finger through the sprinkling of dust that was layered thin across the screen. She wondered where the dust had come from and looked resentfully up towards the air duct. Time was she had a cadre of maintenance crew to take care of such things. _Time was she had an Executive Officer too,_ she thought as she wiped more of the dust away to reveal the screen display, but now he was nothing but a stain on the floor. She smirked and glanced down at the residue of what had once been a loyal officer. One of the best – until the day he tried to kill her. She blamed the dark matter for that – nobody was ever quite the same after they'd been burned in that most peculiar type of fire. The old blood flaked beneath her boots and she supposed she should have scraped the stain from the floor, but she'd left it as a gratifying reminder of her first kill. The first time she'd felt blood running hot through her fingers.

'… _mayday… mayday…'_

The mayday was tinny and small and Ekaterina spent a few moments rerouting systems before succeeding in directing the comms through to the XO's console. The mayday continued to play out on the auxiliary channel, overlaid abruptly by Hektor's ship-to-ship broadcast as Ekaterina made the final connection.

'… _request you stand your weapons down. Please respond. Repeat. This is the SCS Hektor of the Hato Corporation. This is a humanitarian commission…'_

'Turn that off,' said Feydar Zone as Hektor's parley played out its desperate loop. 'How can I concentrate with that in my ear?'

'I thought you might enjoy it,' she said. 'I am. Listen…' She inhaled deeply through her nose and smiled. 'You can hear their fear.'

'Turn it off,' Zone said again. He hadn't moved from his console since lunch, not even to piss.

Ekaterina made no move to turn the broadcast off. After all, _she_ was captain of this ship, wasn't she? And the captain wanted to listen to the music of despair. 'Why don't they run,' she queried with genuine interest.

'Their engines appear to be offline,' Zone replied as he calibrated the cannon array on Hektor's static target and prepared to fire. 'Pity. I was hoping to test the system on a moving target.'

* * *

Harlock closed the door to his quarters with a kick of his leg, looked around for a good place to dump his jacket and boots, decided that right there was as good a place as any and let drop his bundle with long-practiced ease. He was feeling good – an all-too-fleeting sensation these days and he wanted to enjoy it. There was dirt between his toes and water in his hair and the warm sting of an alien sun on his nose, and what would top off a perfect day would be to have the warmer sting of alcohol burning him from the inside as well. He walked barefoot to his desk and surveyed the contents with a critical eye.

'The cabernet is open,' Miimé said. She was stretched sideways across his chair, her sinuous, fluid form draped boneless across the carved wooden arms.

Harlock lifted the bottle of cabernet to find half the contents gone already – disappeared no doubt into the bottomless depths of Miimé. She raised her glass impishly to her lips, and he smiled as he returned the wine to its place in front of her and reached for an unopened bottle of bourbon.

'I like you like this,' she said, watching as he walked to the settee and dropped himself carelessly into the upholstery.

'Like what,' he asked, unsealing the bourbon and casting his gaze around for a tumbler. The nearest was on the desk – dirty and fingerprinted and with a millimetre of crusted alcohol caked along its bottom – but he didn't feel like getting up, and Miimé was showing no signs of assistance even though it was obvious what he was looking for. She tilted her head, looking at him, and smiling a smile that was both enticing and annoying all at the same time. He smiled back at her, because sometimes he liked being annoyed.

'You're smiling,' she said, studying him with her feline eyes as he raised the bourbon to his lips and took a hefty slug straight from the bottle. 'This planet seems good for you.'

'Maybe I'll stay,' he said carelessly, turning on the settee and stretching himself lengthwise along it, his head resting on one velvet-upholstered arm and his feet dangling free across the other. 'Plant some seeds and watch them grow.'

'Flowers?' she asked, because that was the only seed she'd ever seen aboard Arcadia. And that one had never sprouted, no matter how many times Harlock had willed it to grow.

'Maybe.' Harlock looked up at the ornate architraves of the ceiling.

'A farmer?' she asked, with an irritating hint of mirth in her voice. It was the first time she had heard this one.

'Why not?' The bottle glinted as Harlock brought the bourbon again to his lips. 'It was good enough for my father.'

'Your father,' she said, uncoiling herself from the chair and coming towards him. 'Tell me the story again – how long was he a farmer?'

'Long enough to like it.' Harlock took another swig from his bottle, remembering the precious short years his father had spent coaxing life from the dirt before he'd been encouraged back into the service at the business end of a gun. 'But not long enough to hate it.' He took another swallow and glanced towards her as she approached. 'I saw you outside,' he said as the alcohol spread warm through his limbs.

'I felt the sun.' She bent down to inspect the tan on his face, one hand sliding into the damp of his hair and spreading another kind of warmth through his body. 'I can still feel it, here, in your hair.'

He lowered the bottle to the floor and took hold of her hand. 'If I let you keep Aristotle,' he asked, pulling her down on top of him, 'would you stay?'

She laughed and stretched herself along his body, not minding that he was moist around his edges with water and sweat. 'Farming is no life for a Nibelung,' she breathed, her face close to his.

'And this,' he said, his words encompassing the ship, the stars, and the galaxy beyond, 'is no life for anybody.'

'But it's _our_ life,' she reminded him. Kissed him. Stretched out the moment to give him time to fully understand what she'd said.

* * *

'Shields up,' Daley said, and Montgomery shot a look at the captain from the corner of his eye – Hektor's shields wouldn't stand up to whatever that monster was about to dish out. The captain was sweating visibly, glistening beads of it visible on his scalp and shining between the buzzcut tufts of his hair. Montgomery was sweating too, he could feel it collecting beneath his armpits and dampening the collar of his uniform. The XO licked his lips, the overlong ends of his moustache as sharp as sandpaper against his tongue. Beside him Wu persisted with his comms, while Henderson was still hard at work at his mayday. Montgomery wished they would both shut up, since nobody was going to be responding anytime soon. Hektor was on her own – out of range of any SDF patrols and drifting dead in the water.

'Brace!' somebody said, but Montgomery was already bracing, watching as the cannon on the screen locked in their mounts and the particle beams ignited, orange fire erupting in wild and unstoppable arcs towards Hektor. Flame lashed against the hull, the beams lancing obliquely away as Hektor's shields deflected the first burst. Hektor shuddered and tilted on her axis, the crew almost tumbling from their posts as the deck canted thirty degrees. Montgomery glanced across at Wu, the mate's fingers gripping for grim life onto his console as another salvo hit them broadside.

'Hold on!' Wu was saying – at least that's what Montgomery imagined Wu was saying. Montgomery could see the mate's lips moving, but he couldn't hear a thing over the blood pounding in his ears.

* * *

 _((i've been thinking))_

'About what,' Harlock asked, one hand meandering along Miimé's back to rest against the rounded cheeks of her buttocks.

 _((komarov can't be working alone))_

Harlock squeezed his fingers into Miimé's gently yielding flesh. 'Stop thinking, my friend. You're giving me a headache.'

 _((what are you going to do))_

'About what,' Harlock said again, knowing the purposeful obtuseness would drive Tochiro insane.

 _((you can't pretend she isn't out there))_

'Yes I can.'

 _((oh yes. you always were an expert at ignoring the bleeding obvious))_

'Not this again,' Harlock said, turning his gaze towards the ceiling as though he could see Tochiro up there, glaring at him.

 _((why not. you can't keep sleepwalking forever))_

Any other time the jibe would shut the captain down, the conversation ended on the broken ends of words. But not this time. Not today.

'Ignore him,' Harlock said into Miimé's ear as he groped with his free hand for the bottle on the floor. 'He's pissed because I want a pool.' Bottle found, Harlock raised it to his lips, the liquor warm against his tongue. Warmer still as it passed into his blood and flushed visibly across the surface of his skin.

 _((i'm pissed because there's another Deathshadow out there – ))_

'I've never swam before,' said Miimé, her hand sliding beneath Harlock's shirt, her fingers long and cool against the warmth of his flesh.

 _(( – and you're pretending it doesn't exist))_

'Swum,' Harlock corrected, lowering the bottle back to the floor. He brushed his fingers through the liquid silk of her hair, tucking it neatly behind the upswept tip of her ear. 'Miimé wants a pool,' he announced to the ceiling, knowing that if Miimé wanted it, Miimé would get it.

 _((piss off))_

Harlock grinned and shifted on the couch, Miimé light where she lay atop him. She smelled good, and cool, with her fingers splayed pleasantly across the skin of his chest. The only thing that would feel better would be to have his own fingers hot against her bare skin, but he was too tired, and too lazy, to try and wrestle her out of her flightsuit. That thing was tighter on her than her skin.

 _((what are you going to do about ekaterina komarov)),_ Tochiro persisted in the time-honoured way, in the way that, back when they were both human, might have ended in blows.

'I don't need to do anything,' Harlock said as Miimé's fingers repositioned themselves beneath the warm cocoon of his shirt.

There was a heartbeat of silence from the voice in Harlock's head, a moment of perplexity that in itself spoke volumes. 'Don't worry,' Harlock relented as he reached again for his bottle. 'Ekaterina will make another move. She hates me too much to let this go.'

* * *

Rivera was locking down the third bulkhead when the first salvo hit, catching Hektor broadside and sending a deep and bone-jarring shudder through the superstructure of the transport. Rivera fell hard against the wall, righting himself with difficulty as the ship listed drunkenly to starboard. Light flared in the portholes that punctured the corridor wall – the orange beam of a particle cannon as a second salvo slammed into the ship, followed by the blue corona of Hektor's shields sparking in response.

 _Shit,_ Rivera thought, his brain registering an alarm that the stoic canvas of his face refused flatly to betray. A third salvo slammed into the hull and set him staggering again, a fourth hit rumbling through almost immediately, not as strong, and this time more noticeably to the rear sector.

Rivera turned back to face the way he had come, that last fleeting image of the passengers flashing into his brain. Those trusting faces. The women and children. The snot-nosed brat with the tiny baby teeth… He took off at a lope, barrelling back the way he had come as the evacuation klaxon kicked in, accompanied by the smell of smoke wafting faintly on the air as the electrics shorted out and Hektor's systems began their downward slide to failure.

One blast door down, and Rivera bolted to the next, the smoke thicker now and gathering in clouds that swirled white against the ceiling. He was sweating as his huge fingers fumbled at the panel, trying not to breathe as the ship listed under another salvo and the door remained resolutely shut. _Shit._ Rivera input the code again, heaved bodily at the blast door, kicked out at it with a booted foot, but the bastard thing wasn't moving and nothing was going to make it. Carlos slammed the side of his fist against the intercom and was rewarded with a functioning channel.

'Jimmy! Override the seal on bulkhead 37!'

There was a hiss of white noise, the tell-tale crackle of too much voltage across the sparking intercom, and Jimmy's voice came through broken by static. 'Carlos? That you? We're going down.'

Did Jimmy just say that?

'Override the seal on 37!' Carlos barked, the words rushing out of him, borne on a desperate need to know those trusting faces would get out alive.

'We're going _down,'_ Jimmy said again. 'Evacuate the passengers and get yourself – '

' _I can't evacuate!'_ Carlos slammed his fist against the wall. 'They're trapped. I can't get through the bulkhead. Override the seal on – '

The lights dimmed, the ship groaning audibly as her listing hull was stressed beyond endurance.

' – we got out a mayday,' Jimmy was saying. 'Sit tight, just sit – '

Another salvo slammed into the ship, closer to him, and Rivera realised that it was too late. A bone-shuddering screech worked its way through the superstructure, the floor warping beneath his feet as the ship cleaved in two and the rear section fell raggedly away. Carlos felt the biting cold of vacuum licking at the other side of the bulkhead and he moved warily away from the blast door, away from the 20 centimetres of reinforced steel that was now the only thing standing between himself and space.

Almost of their own accord, his eyes turned towards the nearest port to space, watching as the splintered rear-section of Hektor disgorged its cargo of passengers into the bottomless void. Most were already dead, their lungs crystallised into shards at the first inhalation of vacuum. Others were less dead, faces contorting with horror as their skin solidified in the numbing cold and fractured into blood-tinted splinters of ice.


	6. part 6

**The Wheel**

* * *

 **part six**

* * *

Ekaterina Komarov watched dispassionately as the Hektor tore apart on the screen. At this magnification the destruction presented quite a spectacle, mesmerising in its intensity, the sparking flares of the particle cannon almost blinding as they arced the distance between Deathshadow and Hektor and brought plumes of light and fire blossoming into space. The irises of Ekaterina's cold blue eyes contracted with each flare of destruction, and she fancied could see the faces of Hektor's crew as they spilled out into the freezing vacuum of space. The distant figures were a study in flailing limbs, tiny windmills that froze abruptly into the contracted poses they would wear for all eternity.

Her lips twitched as she watched, making her blink as she analysed an unexpected impulse. Disgust, she decided, since empathy had long since been leached out of her, and it wasn't something she'd ever been any good at anyway. She suspected that particular lack might have given her an edge when they were appointing captains of the Fleet, since empathy was something that a captain should never have, especially when the mission parameters specifically involved the deaths of civilians. Why Harlock had been appointed commander she'd never understood. In tactics he was unsurpassed, and he had predictive abilities that bordered on the psychic, but when it came to _people_ he was soft. Harlock believed in humanity. He had hope, and it was his hope that made him weak.

Ekaterina's lips twitched again, but this time the impulse was much more obvious, the anger of a hundred years producing a good, solid sneer that she turned abruptly onto Feydar Zone.

'Get it over with,' she said through her sneer.

Zone didn't look up. Made no indication he even heard her as he bent over his board, absorbed entirely by his readings and his calibrations. He seemed oblivious to the destruction that unfolded on the screen in front of him, flowery blooms of light and fire that sent the component parts of Hektor spinning in a hundred thousand directions. And then he looked up at the screen and smiled.

'Beautiful,' he said, and he was right. It was summer festival of light, and the tiny, tumbling figures of men presented their own beauty as they died, if you only had the eyes to see it.

'Open a channel,' he requested politely as a smile tugged unexpectedly at the corner of his mouth. 'I would like to speak to the authorities.'

* * *

Tochiro leaned further down into the truck's engine well, scowling when a gloved hand reached in and obstructed his field of view. 'I said get your hands out of it,' he snapped.

'And I told you to shut up.' Harlock leaned over the malfunctioning motor, his shadow passing between the sun and the engine block. 'I'm helping,' he murmured as he fiddled around with the connections.

'I don't need help, you big dumb stupid – '

'Watch it.' Harlock plucked a wire from the bundle clutched between Tochiro's sweating fingers and slid it home with careless ease. 'Don't forget I'm your commanding _ooff...'_

Tochiro dug an irritated elbow into Harlock's ribs, smirking when it impacted too low and sank an inch into his friend's unprepared stomach. 'Washboard abs my arse,' the shorter man drawled.

Harlock backed out from under the hood of the transport, one hand clasped around the affront to his abdomen as he seriously considered lodging his boot into his friend's backside. Tochiro may have been the greatest engineering mind in the Fleet –

 _((thank you))_

' _For thinking you were the greatest engineering mind in the Fleet?'_

 _((for not putting that boot up my arse))_

– but he had a problem accepting help. The stubborn bastard had to do everything himself, no matter what it cost.

'I hope that hurt.' Tochiro's tone was fractious, but the downturn of his mouth betrayed the remorse he was feeling.

'Didn't feel a thing.' Harlock straightened with effort. 'Washboard abs, remember.'

'Idiot,' Tochiro said, by way of apology.

'Moron,' Harlock said, forgiving him. 'Speaking of which…' he glanced at his watch '…we have a ship waiting. If you can't get this heap going we'll have to call a patrol to pick us up. We need to make that launch window.'

'Ahhh…' Tochiro scuffed his boots in the gravel, gathered up his nerve and said, '…would it be so bad if we missed the rendezvous?'

There was an old saying about pins dropping, and if it wasn't for the rustle of leaves in the shallow breeze and the steady thrum of a vehicle approaching on the road, pins dropping is what Tochiro would have heard in the empty space that followed his words. As the vehicle spun by and dopplered into silence, he risked a glance at his commanding officer, wincing inwardly at the not-so-subtle tightening of Harlock's lips.

'The Nibelung aren't going anywhere,' Tochiro ventured, hefting a screwdriver in his sweaty hands and fumbling it so that it almost dropped to the dirt. 'They've been waiting months,' he said, wiping the screwdriver against his uniform leg. 'One more day in quarantine won't hurt...'

'I thought you wanted to help them.'

'I _am_ helping them. I've _already_ helped them!'

Harlock closed his mouth, all expression falling from his face the way the wind died down before storm. Leaves rustled around them in the trees, and a cicada screeched experimentally in the roadside foliage. Harlock's eyes pierced the nearby bushes and the cicada abruptly ceased its screaming.

 _((the silent treatment. i never liked that))_

' _I've forgotten what it's like to have silence in my head.'_

Tochiro turned away from his friend and slammed the hood down with a bang.

'Seriously,' Harlock said to Tochiro's hunkered back. 'You're doing this. Now.'

'Doing what?' Tochiro turned to look at him, his shoulders rising in a gesture of innocence one hundred percent guaranteed to piss his friend off.

'You know what. The same pig-headed stunt you always pull. Changing your mind at the last minute.'

'I'm not changing my mind. I'm discussing my concerns with my commanding officer. _Captain.'_

'And what,' Harlock queried, minus the question mark, _'exactly,_ are your concerns.'

'Dark matter.' Tochiro ignored the tone. 'I don't think we can control it.'

Harlock continued to stare at him.

'More to the point,' Tochiro continued, 'I'm not sure anymore that we should try.'

' _You're not sure we should try..._ ' Harlock repeated, incredulous. He shook his head, unbelieving that his friend was laying this shit on him. Now. 'I can hardly take that back to Council,' he told him. Not after the Sanction's careful planning. Ships had been built. An entire fleet equipped with Nibelung technology and dark matter drives and eight hundred men and women standing by for deployment. Not forgetting the armada of angry, disenfranchised expatriates who were preparing to re-take Earth by storm. The Homecoming…

Harlock searched Tochiro's face, read the entreaty in his eyes and sighed. 'To summarise, your concerns are that we may not be able to control the dark matter.'

Tochiro nodded. 'The math says one thing, but the physics says something else altogether. I need more time on the simulations. Plus we haven't accounted for bleedthrough and how that might affect a human crew, let alone the effect on the space-time continuum at the inskip entry and exit points. And there are indications that – '

Harlock gestured impatiently to cut him off. 'The Nibelung have been controlling dark matter for millennia. Are you suggesting that their process is imperfect, or are you suggesting that they've lied to us about their technology?'

'Not lying. Not as such.' Tochiro looked guilty as he spoke, knowing he was chipping away at the fairy tale that planet Earth had built out of nothing but hope. 'But maybe, _maybe,_ they're not telling us the whole story. Think about it – they're alien. They _think_ differently. And maybe truth and reality are not concepts they understand. Not the way we do.'

 _((i hate always being right…))_

Harlock stared down at his friend.

' _I hate it when you're right, too…'_

The Nibelung were the first alien race that humanity had encountered – four lost waifs, the last survivors of a once and mighty race. Harlock had watched the first-contact footage and he couldn't help but be stirred by their forlorn beauty, by the innocent, childlike faces that promised the Coalition victory in war. The strange juxtaposition between their soft feminine beauty and their ability to destroy... Harlock hadn't even met them and already he wanted to love them.

'…maybe they've learned to live with the bleedthrough,' Tochiro was continuing. 'Maybe it doesn't affect them. Hell,' he said, rolling up his sleeves in the warm afternoon air, 'maybe they eat dark matter for breakfast.'

Harlock glanced up at the sky with its scattering of clouds. He trusted his friend, _but._ Nothing on this earth could halt the inexorable machine of the Gaia Sanction. Not now. Not when the Homecoming was so close you could smell it.

'You told the Council,' Harlock said to the scudding clouds, 'that if the Nibelung transferred the tech to the fleet you could contain it. You modified the Deathshadow fleet specifically to _contain it.'_ He looked back at his friend. 'We're meeting the Nibelung today as representatives of the Sanction. As officers of the Coalition. As members of the human race. Do you know how many lives depend on what happens today?'

'You don't have to tell me. I know what will happen.'

The sun moved out from behind a cloud and struck the reflective planes of Tochiro's glasses, speared a shard of light into Harlock's eyes.

'It's too late,' Harlock said. 'The Council isn't going to care about second thoughts.'

'I know.'

Harlock sighed emphatically. 'It's thanks to you I drink.'

 _((i know))_

* * *

Aristotle opened his eyes, blinked to get the sleep out of them and wished he'd put some clothes on before he'd crawled under the covers.

'How long have you been there,' he said to the figure seated on the edge of his bed.

Miimé shrugged, an enigmatic rise of the shoulders that could have meant either that she didn't know or that she didn't particularly care. 'Time is relative,' she said, and it sounded as though she knew what she was talking about.

'So I've heard,' he replied, lifting his head to look sideways at the chronometer. 'But on the scale of relativity,' he suppressed a sigh when he saw the time and dropped his head back to the pillow, 'watching me sleep would have to be relatively boring.'

'I was watching you dream,' she corrected him, her cat-like eyes roving lightly across his bleary blue ones.

'Oh,' he said, bringing one arm out from under the covers and sliding his hand beneath his head, the increase in elevation giving him a better view of his visitor. Light flowed faintly from the Nibelung's skin, an illumination all her own that offset the low-level glow that always filled his room. Aristotle never turned the lights all the way off – he'd spent too much time in the dark to want to go down that particular psychological path. 'And how is that different?'

She cocked her head, her eyes tracing a trail along the musculature of his exposed arm and settling on the tuft of blond hair that nested in his armpit. 'It's different,' she said, her gaze retracing its steps until it met again with his eyes.

Aristotle's legs shifted beneath the covers. He felt vulnerable beneath the pale burn of her gaze, as if every inch of him lay exposed to her scrutiny despite the blanket that covered him, and Miimé seemed to know it. She reached towards him, smirking as he tensed and pressed back into the pillow, one long, pale arm reaching past him to pluck his reading tablet from the stand beside the bed.

'Mph,' he grunted, feeling foolish. He brought his other arm out and rested it on his chest. 'You like books?'

Miimé continued smirking at his foolishness as she slid her fingers across the screen of the device. 'Harlock likes books,' she said as she scrolled through the titles packed into the memory. 'Liked,' she corrected, changing the tense. 'He doesn't read them anymore.'

'Must've run out,' Aristotle murmured, wondering how many books a man could get through in a hundred years of navel-gazing. He watched, bemused, as her long fingers played across the screen, not bothered that she'd lost his place in the chapter he'd left open. 'Do you read,' he asked, curious, 'because if you don't, maybe I could, you know, read for you some time?' The emphasis fell hard on the 'read', equal measures of both hope and innuendo.

Miimé stopped in her scrolling, selected a page at random and parted her lips to speak. _'Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned,'_ she recited with measured cadence, her voice less bell-like than Aristotle had heard it before, _'and many the woes he suffered in his heart upon the sea.'_

She looked up and met his eyes, her face eerie and wraith-like in the glow from the screen.

'The Odyssey,' he told her. He was in safer territory now, with the classics, but for some reason, with the look in her eyes and the tone in her voice, he felt less safe than he ever had before. 'It's about a man, a sailor, who is imprisoned by a beautiful nymph who won't let him go home.'

She lowered the tablet and looked at him. 'Nymph,' she said slowly, exploring the word with her alien tongue. 'What is 'nymph'?'

'Ah,' he said, staring into her face. 'Women of such beauty that no man is able to resist their charms.' He reached out with his fingers to brush the sleeve of her gown. 'The ancient storytellers must have had you in mind when they wrote about them...'

As lines go it was as lame as shit and he knew it, but she smiled at him anyway – inter-species charity that manifested as a contemplative crook at the corner of her mouth. 'Does the sailor ever return home?' she asked as the gauze of her gown slipped like water through his fingers.

'He does.' Aristotle settled deeper into his pillow, his hand returning thwarted to its resting-place on his chest. 'After many years of sailing. And, as you heard, many woes upon his heart.' His lips quirked into what he hoped was a reassuring smile. 'But woe aint necessarily a bad thing. Everybody has their share of it.'

She studied him, considering, and it seemed her thoughts were coming to a momentous conclusion. And then the moment was gone and she was standing over him, though he'd never seen her rise from the bed.

'And the nymph?' she asked as a firefly drifted from her hair.

'She set the sailor free,' he murmured, with the uncomfortable sensation that the firefly had just been inside his head.

That gave her pause. 'And what,' she whispered, her voice sombre and sad, 'if she could never let him go?'

'Hey.' Aristotle reached out and took hold of her wrist, surprised by its supple coolness. She felt like a bird beneath his calloused fingers, her bones hollow and delicate and ready for flight. He pulled her back down to the bed, the momentum bringing her close to him so that her breasts now pressed against his chest and her eyes rose before his own, a pair of luminous, pale-glowing moons.

'It's just a story,' he told her as a burst of fireflies stung against his bare skin, tiny sparks of light that transformed the dimness of his room into a spinning galaxy of stars. 'You can always change the ending.'

* * *

Harlock woke from the dream and opened the only eye the gods – or fate, or his own stupidity – had left to him, and wondered why his dreamscapes took him so often to the blasted plains of his memories when they could just as easily be depositing him on the unknown terrains of the years yet to come. Dreams were when he drifted free, unfettered by space and time and constrained only by a dread of the far horizon – it seemed even his subconscious mind preferred the sins of his past as opposed to the sins he planned to visit on the future.

 _((our relationship with linear time has changed)),_ Tochiro had explained to him in the darkness that followed the destruction of the Earth and Harlock had curled trembling around his anguish, bleeding tendrils of blue smoke as the atoms of his body rearranged themselves into endless patterns of pain. _((we're caught in a temporal loop a thousand years long…))_

' _The chain reaction shattered one of the Nodes of the Ancients,'_ Miimé whispered to him, her body coalescing into light and just as quickly dissolving into darkness again. She'd seemed like an angel in those moments of apparition, a Madonna from another world bestowing melancholy smiles upon him. But her smiles had failed to heal his wounds, and a true Madonna would surely have kissed him on the brow and sent him to whatever afterlife awaited him.

Or maybe this _was_ his afterlife.

 _No..._

Not like this. Not an eternity of _this._

'There must be a way to escape it,' Harlock had said after an eon of darkness and contemplation, because he was still living and still human despite the dark matter that coursed through his veins.

 _((the only way to escape it is to break it))_

' _Rupture enough Nodes,'_ Miimé had breathed disembodied into his ear, less angelic when he couldn't see her face, _'and you could reset the universe to Time Zero.'_

Bring an end to everything he'd done.

Erase every trace of himself from existence.

Start the universe over.

* * *

Aristotle tucked his shirt back into his pants and washed his hands cursorily in the small sink. He spared a minute – or five – to check himself in the mirror on the wall and considered yet again whether he should grow sideburns or a beard. Shaving was not a favourite activity, but he worried that a beard would make him look older, or worse, like his father, a great hulking Viking of a man with a big laugh and a big lust – for all the wrong things, of course, since wanting the wrong things was the Jones' standout family trait. Followed by failing to think before you act – both of which Aristotle had had plenty of time to think about the past couple of years.

 _Except,_ said the personal devil that was usually confined to the murky darkness of his subconscious but who occasionally crawled out to sit on his shoulder and talk trash at him, _you can't pretend you didn't think about what you were doing, since you had the weapon ready and the location planned and the escape route carefully mapped out…_

 _Yeah yeah,_ Aristotle replied to Senõr Diablo, still studying the square of his jaw and trying to imagine his face with a beard. _But what I didn't think about was where the hell I was going to go after I got away. Lucky I landed in Harlock's lap –_

 _((…which might turn out to be another case of not thinking before you act…))_

– _which might turn out to be another case of not thinking before I act –_

Aristotle froze at the double-echo inside his head and turned slowly to survey the confines of the tiny bathroom.

'Hello?' he said into the too-quiet space, the walls seeming just that little bit closer than they had been a few short moments before. 'Somebody there?'

He waited, ears straining, for a reply to sound above the ever-present background hum of Arcadia – that faint, unsettling heartbeat that in the early days had kept him awake at night, but which now lulled him to sleep like an oversized and far-too-handsome baby.

'I know you're there,' he said with more conviction than he felt, his senses tuned intently for any whisper of a reply. But whatever it was, it was gone.

 _Idiot._ Aristotle scratched absently at his chin and sighed. _This place has got you talking to the walls –_

He teetered suddenly on his feet, taken off-guard by Arcadia's unexpected entry into inskip. The process still made him queasy, a split-second of disorientation when it seemed he briefly entered some other time and space.

Or maybe it was the veil being lifted from his eyes and he was seeing time and space for what it really was.

* * *

 _((get up))_

Harlock rolled onto his stomach, bunched the pillow beneath his face and squeezed his eye tight shut. 'Piss off,' he mumbled into the pillow, not at all pleased. He'd been on the verge of sliding back into sleep, enjoying a rare moment of dreamless peace inside his head.

 _((get up))_ Tochiro urged again, a disembodied alarm clock that buzzed irritatingly inside Harlock's brain. _((move your goddamned arse))_

'I'm busy,' Harlock replied in fair imitation of the first mate, a smile ghosting across his lips when he remembered the first time Yattaran had told him that. Harlock had never been much of a disciplinarian, even in the force, but he'd never been confronted with outright insubordination before. He remembered his eyebrow rising in amazement, and Miimé stifling a delicate laugh, but then he'd had to laugh too because the situation had been utterly and entirely ridiculous.

 _((there's something you need to see))_

The vidscreen in Harlock's quarters blazed loudly to life as Tochiro shunted through a feed, and Harlock dragged the pillow over his head as the volume rose to annoying levels. A newscast from one of the inner systems, judging from the pretentiously modulated accents of the announcer. The voice pierced unhindered through the bulk of the pillow, and Harlock spared a moment to visualise what the woman would look like. Middle-aged, he decided. Short hair, perfect teeth, wrinkles around her mouth that no amount of money could erase. Hi-res screens were a bitch.

The volume rose again, challenging him to get out of bed and turn the fucking thing down.

 _((have i got your attention))_

Harlock grunted a rude acknowledgement, pissed because there would be no more sleeping now. 'This sort of shit wasn't funny when you were alive,' he muttered, rolling out of bed and planting his feet on the floor just as Arcadia entered inskip. There was a slip in time, a nauseating moment of imminent dissolution as the dark matter in his body threatened to return him to the Source, and then he was flesh and blood again. Flesh and blood and smoke as tendrils of dark matter leached in blue wisps from his skin.

'What the fuck game are you playing at,' Harlock growled towards the cavernous ceiling.

 _((just look))_

Harlock lurched to his feet and moved to the screen, unduly gratified to see that the presenter was just as he had pictured. Her teeth, when they showed between the paint of her unexpectedly enticing lips, were nice and even and white.

'…a savage act of terrorism in the Nima system…' she was saying as Harlock watched, his eye never leaving the cupid's bow of her mouth.

 _((might be an idea to put some pants on for this))_

'Pants,' Harlock replied as he slid onto the cool leather of his chair to watch, 'are overrated.'

* * *

'Time to celebrate,' Zone announced after Deathshadow had entered inskip and they'd left the destruction of Hektor untold light years behind them.

Ekaterina turned to look at him, remembering celebrations of caviar and champagne and knowing those days were a hundred years dead and buried.

'With what,' she asked of him. 'Month old rations?'

'I meant a more metaphoric celebration,' he told her. 'It's time to rechristen the ship.'

'Why?' Ekaterina liked Deathshadow. It said what it meant, and Deathshadow always delivered.

'Because Deathshadow is no longer the ship she was and she no longer belongs to a long-dead fleet.' Zone waved a hand towards the unmanned stations. 'She'll be the vanguard of a new fleet now. The modifications are complete, and the automated systems are functioning perfectly. She's undefeatable, superior to any other ship in the galaxy. Even,' he said, turning to look at her with a smile of smug satisfaction, 'Arcadia.'

Zone rose from his station and paced the length of the empty bridge as though he owned it. Deathshadow 3 was everything he had always wanted, what he'd striven for his entire career – a fully-automated battleship. He stopped at the gunner's station, obsolete now that Zone could control everything from a single console. 'Every system is at my express command,' he told her as he passed a contemplative finger across the dead display. 'In fact, if it weren't for – '

He stopped talking, censoring his words as he looked up at the main viewscreen and the clouds of dark matter that boiled restlessly outside the ship.

'What you were going to say,' Ekaterina said as she completed the statement, 'was if it weren't for the dark matter drive, you could operate Deathshadow on your own.'

Zone turned sideways to look at her, acceding to her woman's intuition.

'What you seem to have forgotten,' Ekaterina continued, 'is that with all these wonderful automations, it's I who no longer need _you.'_

That cut, and Zone was reminded of Ekaterina and her knives. Perhaps it was time to start locking the door to his quarters at night.

'You might not _need_ me,' he replied, coming to stand close to her, 'but you most definitely _want_ me.' He brought a hand to her breast, his eyes on her own and enjoying the war of emotion that played out in their cold blue wastes. 'It would be a shame,' he murmured, his free hand grasping hold of her wrist and guiding her hand towards his growing erection, 'to break up this somewhat agreeable and mutually beneficial relationship.'

Her hand dropped from his groin as she stepped back from him, but not so far that he had to loosen his grip upon her breast.

'It _is_ agreeable,' she conceded, the cold in her eyes colouring the tone of her voice. 'And it's up to you to ensure that it _stays_ agreeable.'

He smiled a half-smile, one side of his face crooking in acquiescence, the other side unmoving in subtle defiance. The game wasn't over yet, and only time would tell who would emerge victorious.

'Understood, _Captain,'_ he acquiesced with the tiniest of bows of his head. 'And now to name your new ship.'

'Mmm,' she hummed, enjoying being called 'captain' after so many years, and enjoying the warmth of his thumb against the straining bud of her nipple. 'You have something in mind?'

' _Das Molk,'_ he replied with an ostentatious roll of his tongue. Ostentation was rarely called for, and Zone was relishing his moment.

Ekaterina eyed him dubiously, barely recognising the syllables of a language that was dying a slow death out in the systems. 'What does that mean?'

' _The Silence,'_ he translated for her, pleased at his ingenuity. The sting was aimed at Harlock in a mash of Earth's archaic tongues, and the thought unreasonably tickled Zone so that he laughed out loud and showed his fine, even teeth.

'Das Molk,' Ekaterina repeated, enjoying the way the words spilled from her lips and enjoying the way that Zone was watching her, his attention on her mouth and his expression changing in response to some inner urging as she spoke Deathshadow's new name out loud. He leaned closer to her, the pupils of his eyes dilating as the blood rose into his face.

'Das Molk,' Ekaterina said again, taunting him with the lush movement of her lips, and then Zone's mouth was on hers, his tongue hard between her teeth and his breathing harsh through his nose. His hands grasped at her roughly, pulled her towards him and crushed her against the tight planes of his body, his erection grinding against her through the unyielding fabric of his trousers.

* * *

'Fuck,' Harlock said.

 _((still think we don't need to do anything))_

'This changes everything.'

 _((no argument. the last thing we need is the coalition, or the sdf, or any piss-ant local planetary force on our backs))_

In his younger days Harlock would have physically lashed out, put a hole in a wall or slammed a fist in frustration against his desk. But now… He leaned back in his chair and eyed the centimetre of wine he'd left in the previous night's bottle. 'It'll be harder to deploy the oscillators.'

 _((or get to earth, when the time comes…))_

 _Earth…_ The word was a physical blow, an unexpected assault as Harlock's memory threw random images across the surface of his brain. Blue sky, red sky, the smell of burning flesh. And pain. So much pain...

He fought the urge to reach for the last of the wine, a futile twitch of his fingers against the polished grain of his desk, and then his hand wrapped itself around the cool green glass of the bottle.

* * *

'Has anybody on this boat ever considered some kind of inskip warning system,' Aristotle groused as he entered the mess. 'You know, like one of those klaxon things they have on gunboats before they engage in combat or something? A siren, ' he grumbled as he stepped behind the servery and stood with his hands on his hips surveying the disappointing array of supplies. 'Or a pleasant feminine voice,' he muttered to himself, 'announcing our imminent immersion into a space-time dimension that physicists still don't agree actually exists…' He stuffed a bag of crackers into his pants pocket and returned to the main hall. 'Where we headed anyway? And shouldn't one of us be on the bridge – whassamadda?'

Maji and Yattaran stared morosely towards him.

'What?' Aristotle said again, when the two pairs of eyes continued their doleful stare. 'My fly undone?' He fumbled at his pants 'Happens a lot. Got a monster in here that's always trying to get – '

'Shuddup and look.' Yattaran pointed a spoon at the wallscreen and returned his attention to his bowl.

Satisfied the monster wasn't about to break free, Aristotle turned his attention to the monitor and recognised an insystem broadcast logo. 'Huh. Didn't figure you two for being boobtubers.'

'We're not,' Maji said, staring despondently at what was left of his toast. 'Started up by itself.'

'So turn it off.'

'We can't.' Yattaran scooped a spoonful of something pink and gelatinous into his mouth, albeit with far less gusto than normally accompanied such an action. 'And we can't change the feed either.' He glanced superstitiously at the walls. 'Damn thing has a mind of its own.'

'I'll have to rig up a remote,' Maji said, pushing his plate away. 'If we live long enough.'

'Fft,' Yattaran snorted sarcastically, his lips twisting in an expression that said he should've known this was coming all along.

'What's that supposed to mean?' Aristotle dragged a chair to the table and straddled it, snagging what was left of Maji's toast and shoving it into his mouth.

'Keep watching,' Yattaran said, pointing again with his spoon before dipping it back into his bowl.

Aristotle chewed toast and angled to look at the screen.

'…repeating today's top story,' an overly-preened face was saying, 'the refugee ship Hektor has been destroyed in an orchestrated attack with more than three hundred men, women and children feared dead…'

'So what.' Aristotle flicked crumbs from his fingers. 'People die every day. It's a damn tragedy, but I've been in some of these people-movers. Safety's slack, there're never enough escape pods, and they jam those people in like – '

Yattaran's spoon clanked noisily against his bowl, making Aristotle turn to look at him. 'Oh fer Chrissakes,' the mate carped. 'Does your mouth _ever_ stop moving? Didn't you hear the silly bitch? It wasn't an accident, it was an _attack.'_

Aristotle shrugged indifferently, shoved another bite of toast into his mouth and turned his eyes back to the newscaster. It didn't make it any better, but it didn't make it any worse, either. Once you left the nice, neat, regimented worlds of the inner systems you were on your own. Only nobody ever tells you that before you decide to go.

'… the terrorist responsible for this outrage has formally claimed responsibility,' the perfectly preened face on the broadcast was continuing, 'and his identity has been confirmed by Coalition authorities. His name – '

Aristotle stopped chewing. Behind him he heard Maji's chair scrape away from the table as Yattaran's spoon clanked one more time back into his bowl.

' – is Captain Harlock.'


	7. part 7

**The Wheel**

* * *

 **part seven**

* * *

'It's _her,'_ Aristotle growled as he dumped the half-eaten crust of Maji's toast back onto the plate.

Yattaran appraised Arcadia's most recent acquisition with his usual disdain. 'Her who?' he inquired none-too-politely and with his lips still wrapped around his spoon

'That bitch back on Neo Triton. I should have killed her.'

Yattaran slid the spoon from his mouth and pointed it at the rookie. 'You told us you _did_ kill her.'

'I _did_ kill her. I _killed_ her!' Aristotle smacked the mate's spoon out of the air. 'I mean,' he said, turning as Maji returned to stand at the end of the table, 'I _thought_ I killed her. I pumped half a fucking cartridge into her. _Half_ a cartridge!' He shook his head, unbelieving. 'She _had_ to be dead!'

'What sort of moron are you?' Yattaran's spoon dipped into his bowl. 'You either killed her or you didn't.'

'I should have made sure she was dead,' Aristotle muttered, his mouth tightening with incredulity and self-recrimination. He was talking to himself now, addressing his words to the crumbs that smattered across the table. 'I should have taken her fucking head off.'

Yattaran snorted. 'What was she? A vampire? Mmph,' he grunted. 'At least that would explain the blood you came back wearing.' The mate's lip curled. 'This is getting ridiculous _You're_ ridiculous. What's all _this_ got to do with _that?'_ The spoon had left the bowl again and was pointed at the wreckage of the Hektor as it tumbled in high-res across the vidscreen.

'You know,' Aristotle's cool blue eyes lifted to appraise the mate's pudgy face. 'For a genius, sometimes you are stupidly fucking dumb. She's got one of these ships, doesn't she? A Deathshadow? Runs on dark matter?'

Yattaran blinked at him, and Aristotle watched as the mate's eyes narrowed behind the bottle-bottom glasses.

'Yeah. _Now_ you get it. So maybe she's got the same problem as the captain. Maybe _nothing_ can kill her – just like the captain.' Aristotle's face twisted into an incredulous scowl. 'I pumped half a cartridge into her,' he repeated stupidly. 'Half a fucking cartridge!' He swivelled to look at the broadcast again. It showed an external view of an uninviting brown planet, a pleasant voice-over informing the quadrant about a crewmember somehow surviving the attack and his evacuation back to Sasori.

'This sort of shit happens all the time.' Yattaran said. 'What's the connection? How do you know it wasn't an accident? Or Doppler Corp on a recruitment sortie?'

'Because Doppler doesn't leave survivors.' Aristotle turned to look at him grimly. 'It's her. I know it. She's done this to make trouble for the captain. She's trying to draw him out so she can take another shot at him. Or…' he said, glancing at Maji as the engineer stood quietly by the table, '…maybe she's trying to get the SDF to do it for her. Either way, we all just got a great big target painted on our backs.' He waited a moment for the implications of that to sink in, and then he shook his head.'Shit.' He turned back to the screen but the newscaster had moved on to another story. Rain had fallen outside the domes of Mars, good news after a hundred and fifty years of hit-and-miss terraforming. 'We need to keep moving.' Aristotle stared absently at the televised mist as it drifted in soft waves across Mars' long-dead landscape. 'Get out of the quadrant.'

Yattaran grunted. 'Got itchy feet?' he taunted as the spoon clanked against the shallow bottom of the bowl.

Aristotle spun on the mate. 'Whadda _you_ know about it?'

'Hey,' Maji interrupted. 'Somebody has to tell the captain,' he said, the words making Yattaran scrape his chair hurriedly back from the table before the sentence was barely out of the engineer's mouth. The rolls of the mate's stomach knocked against the table in his haste, almost tipping over his bowl and setting the cutlery clashing.

'No you don't.' Aristotle rose to his full height and reached across the table, grabbing hold of the mate's striped sweater before he could get away. 'Maji's right. One of us has to go tell him, _'_ he said, forcing Yattaran back into his chair.

Yattaran glared at the rookie. 'Not me.' There was a layer of the pink slush still in his bowl, and he retrieved his spoon from where it had rattled across the table and recommenced shovelling what was left of his breakfast into his mouth.

'I know I'm new to naval politics,' Aristotle said, slowly and carefully and with the faintest edge of menace, 'and lord knows I still haven't got the hang of the shipboard romance thing, but you're the fucking first mate. Isn't it your job?'

'My job,' Yattaran pointed his slop-covered spoon at the rookie, 'is to tell you what to do.'

Aristotle leaned all the way across the table. 'You reckon?'

'I reckon.' The spoon dipped back into the bowl.

The rookie's face hovered centimetres from the mate's. 'Oh you do, do you?'

'Do you mind?' Yattaran inquired around a mouthful of mush. 'I'm trying to eat.'

'And I'm trying not to throw up.'

Yattaran raised the spoon threateningly. 'Get out of my – '

'Fellas!' It was the engineer, surprising himself with his outburst as much as anybody else. He scratched a calloused finger through his goatee as Yattaran and Aristotle turned to stare at him. 'One of us needs to tell the captain.'

'Right,' agreed Aristotle. He turned to smile at Yattaran. 'And since this ship is crewed by first-graders, there's only one proper way to decide.'

* * *

' _Enter,'_ the door said. Or somebody behind the door said something that sounded like 'enter', except that the voice was faraway and muffled by the thick timber paneling.

Yattaran's finger pulled back from the splinter he'd been poking in the dark grain and he sniffed, hard. Hard enough to dislodge something moist from the back of his throat and send it tunneling down his oesophagus. He grimaced – not because of the sensation of phlegm curdling into porridge, but because he'd been outsmarted, two to one.

He pushed against the door, ignorant if the wood was oak or ash or any one of the thousands of timbers that forested the glorified sanctuary of Earth. What did he care, undesirable that he was and summarily prevented from returning to his homeworld by a bunch of puritan elites with sticks rammed so far up their clean-licked arses that they couldn't talk straight. He hadn't caught so much as a glimpse of the blue globe of his birth-right before his convoy had been turned away, the little group of refugees not even making it past the Jupiter blockade. No surprise they hadn't made it even halfway through the solar system – it was a desperate attempt and doomed to failure from the start. But Yattaran had been younger then, and thinner, and he had never once considered that failure could be an option.

The door swung wide on impeccably balanced hinges and Yattaran sucked back another gob of spit as he lumbered gracelessly through.

'Ah,' he said by way of formal greeting, and feeling as awkward as he ever did inside the captain's private domain. But a deal was a deal and, as Yattaran had to keep telling himself, he'd been outsmarted. Two to one.

Harlock nodded acknowledgment of the greeting and rested an elbow on the arm of his chair to wait. The mate floundered beneath his captain's steady gaze, his bottom lip disappearing self-consciously beneath his teeth, and Harlock would have suggested he take a seat on the settee before he fell over, only the mate was apparently afraid of proper furniture. The one and only time Yattaran had ever sat himself on Harlock's settee, he had spent an awkward time perched on the edge of the crimson velvet as though he were afraid he might leave a stain. If only the mate knew how many times Miimé had perched her bare ass on that velvet and hadn't left so much as a mark.

'Lose a bet?' Harlock inquired at last, to halt the incessant shuffling.

Yattaran's eyes widened in a _'how did you know'_ expression, his bottom lip moistly reappearing and pursing itself with self-recrimination against its partner. 'I drew scissors,' he told the captain with tight-lipped chagrin.

Harlock shook his head in genuine disappointment. 'Rookie mistake,' he said, reaching for the goblet perched in front of him on the desk.

'I was outsmarted,' the mate told him as his indignation reignited. 'Two to one.' He tugged awkwardly at the belt on his trousers. 'How'd you know I lost a bet?'

Harlock drained the goblet in one clean swallow and placed the empty glass carefully back onto the desk. 'Intuition.'

Yattaran grinned awkwardly and rubbed at the back of his head. He had to admit it was hard to outsmart the captain – Harlock seemed to have eyes everywhere. 'Is that breakfast?' he inquired of the now-empty glass on the captain's desk and still hedging around the inevitable.

'Given the circumstances.' Harlock's gaze never moved from the mate.

'Oh.' The hand transferred from the back of Yattaran's head to the back of his trousers. 'So you already know?' He shouldn't have been surprised.

Harlock nodded. His ankles uncrossed beneath the desk as he prepared to stand up. 'Give me ten minutes,' he said, 'and then call the crew to the bridge.'

* * *

'Waa-ark,' said the bird, or at least something that sounded like 'waa-ark' in a repertoire that was confined to warks and squarks and painfully gurgled aaaarks that invariably meant one of two things – either 'feed me,' or _'feed me!'_ Aristotle Jones felt confident by now that he could decipher any and all of the bird's migraine-inducing utterances, but he was completely incapable of understanding why the captain kept the annoying thing around in the first place.

Glancing around the bridge, though, he had to wonder why Harlock kept any of them around at all. Miimé, well, _that,_ at least, he could understand. Aristotle watched her at the dark matter generator, her fingers immersed in the misty green tendrils of the control orb, her hair drifting in an unfelt breeze like a curtain of golden silk, shifting and parting to reveal the small of her back and the perfectly-shaped contours of her –

'Ark,' said the bird from its perch on the back of the captain's chair.

'Arse,' Aristotle corrected. 'Good bird. You're learning.'

The bird leapt awkwardly to the deck, its talons clacking noisily on the pressed metal as it waddled purposefully towards him.

'Oh hell no,' Aristotle muttered, goose-stepping around the determined creature. 'Later,' he told it, gratified when the bird halted its assault and fixed a beady eye mistrustfully upon him. 'This time I mean it,' he said, in what he hoped was a believable manner. 'I'll even open the packet for you.'

'That's a promise you'd better keep.' Harlock's voice echoed disembodied from the shadows, making Aristotle jump and the bird squawk and ruffle its feathers. 'Wark,' it said, taking flight and flapping haphazardly towards the high space above the command. Aristotle shot Maji and Yattaran a glare – _why didn't you tell me he was there?_ – that was met with blandly shrugged shoulders. He moved to join the engineer and mate as the captain strode into the light, shadows clinging like smoke to the black leathers of the flightsuit he now sported – a one piece with yellow piping that was tightly zipped and buttoned to his throat. Aristotle narrowed his eyes – not for the first time he'd seen wisps of blue rising from the captain's body and curling through the tendrils of his hair, and he was still trying to figure out what it was.

Harlock glanced at the rookie as he strode along the gantry, and then he had moved past, with the shadows trailing behind him and the smell of ozone lingering for a moment in the air. Aristotle ducked as the bird swooped down in a wash of sudden wind and feathers, circled once around the bridge and came to perch with unexpected grace on the captain's shoulder.

'Old friend,' Harlock murmured as he came to stand before the wheel, and then he turned to face his men.

* * *

' _It all depends on your point of view,'_ Tochiro was forever explaining, generally at those times when his moon-pie face was hovering at chest-height with a busty maid, and his point of view consisted of an unbroken expanse of ample heaving bosom.

Harlock's point of view was of necessity much different, since he towered over most mere mortals and had to be much more flexible than his undersized friend if he ever wanted to plant his face into anybody's heaving bosom. Conventional wisdom dictated that it would be easiest to throw your wench onto a bed and tackle the problem from the horizontal, but Harlock was far from conventional and quite liked the novelty of table-tops and fucking his women up against walls. Interesting, then, to see how Harlock was coping with being fucked up against a wall himself, by none other than Ekatarina Komarov.

 _That_ had to hurt.

' _Old friend,'_ Harlock was saying, his hand on the wheel and his fingers curling delicately around the hand-carved baluster.

Tochiro couldn't feel Harlock's hand on the wood, not the way he could feel the kirlian buzz of fingertips when they trailed along corridor walls, or when meteorites tore tiny burning breaches into the skin of Arcadia's hull. The ship's wheel was separate from him, carved of wood and insulated from the ship, isolated and apart and containing the one failsafe that could – and one day probably would – disengage him from the system and confine him to the core of Arcadia's central computer.

But Harlock would have to choose to do that. And things between them would have to be so fractured, so irretrievably broken, that Harlock would prefer to continue on alone.

The part of Tochiro that processed emotion coolly considered that prospect. It was strange, the thought that his friend could choose, willfully, to cut Tochiro free, and Tochiro wasted several microseconds calculating possibilities and probabilities and secreting them away for future analysis. He didn't often waste processor space on his relationship with Harlock – Tochiro had died without fear, passing into the dark matter field in a perfect state of connection and peace and yes, even love, and he could see no reason why any of that would change. And as long as they stayed inside the field, as long as those tenuous, dark tendrils bound them so tightly together, and as long as they continued to skirt across the very edge of Time, nothing _could_ change.

Tochiro's attention turned outwards again, darted from console to console and hitched a brief ride on a spark of dark matter, his consciousness sliding through Miimé's fingers and making her smile as she felt him pass through. And then he was back in the mainframe again, watching through the cameras as Harlock spoke to his crew. Tochiro's vision shifted from infrared to ultraviolet and back again as the life-force of the four men burned bright across his sensors. Harlock, an electric pulse of ultraviolet blue that moved now from the wheel to meet with his crew upon the gantry. Yattaran, a burning ball of red and hot yellow. Maji, his compact frame traced in reds and yellows and cool relaxing greens. And Aristotle, pulsing yellow and red and with a spark of blue where the dark matter had entered through the wound to his abdomen before it had healed, and was now encroaching slowly through his veins.

They were good men, all as broken as each other, all of them weighed down with mistakes and regrets, and all of them alone. Men who Harlock would one day call upon to be heroes.

Or villains.

It all depended on your point of view.

* * *

'Things will be different,' Harlock told the crew. 'The SDF will be on our backs. The Gaia Fleet. Local defence forces. Bounty hunters. Anybody with a gun.' Having a price on their heads was not going to be fun, and while Harlock had grown _au fait_ with being shot at, he had to suppress a shudder at the thought of the detainment notices the law enforcement would soon be distributing. They'd probably drag out his original service ID, a hundred years old and counting.

'And not forgetting that bitch,' Aristotle added.

'No.' Harlock met Aristotle's intent blue eyes. 'Not forgetting her.'

Harlock turned back to the wheel, walked a few paces and stopped when the bird sprang from his shoulder and disappeared into the cavernous vault above the bridge. 'This is your chance to depart,' he said to his men, though his eyes still followed the bird through the dark. 'Miimé has us on course for Sura. If you want to disembark there, you can.'

'That shithole?' Yattaran blurted with unbridled scorn. 'I won't be getting off there.'

Harlock turned to face the mate. 'Then name your port,' he said.

'Sorry, Captain, but I won't be getting off at all.' Yattaran hitched up his pants with a modicum of defiance and looked the captain boldly in the eye. 'I retreated from the Fleet once before and I won't be doing it again.' He glanced across at Maji. 'Plus we've got a job to do, and Arcadia can outrun and outgun any ship in this damn galaxy. Bring it on, I say.'

The words brought a smile to Harlock's lips, brief and fleeting and gone as suddenly as it appeared. 'Maji?' he asked.

'Yattaran's right,' the engineer said. 'We've still got work to do. You brought me on to modify the oscillators and I've still got half of them left. I won't be leaving.'

Harlock nodded. 'Aristotle?'

The rookie shrugged. 'I got nowhere else to be.' And then he grinned with malicious intent. 'Besides, I want to be there when you take that bitch out.'

Harlock inhaled, a deep expansion of his chest as he filled his lungs with air along with an in-swell of purpose. 'Then it's time to begin.' He turned and strode to the command and set himself down in the captain's chair. 'Stations,' he said, watching with his one good eye as Yattaran and Maji moved to their stations and Aristotle hot-footed it down to the lower bridge.

'Orders, Captain?' Yattaran activated the nav and spun on stout legs to face his captain.

'Sasori,' Harlock said, making the mate's mouth hang slightly ajar.

'Sasori?' the mate queried as he stared hard at the captain.

Harlock leaned comfortably back in his chair. 'You heard me.'


End file.
